Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Over the past four years, KrebsOnSecurity has been targeted by countless denial-of-service attacks intended to knock it offline. Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity was hit by easily the most massive and intense such attack yet — a nearly 200 Gbps assault leveraging a simple attack method that industry experts say is…
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CHAPTER from SKIN IN THE GAME
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
Years ago, while working on an explanation of the Fourier Transform, I found this diagram: Most ideas aren't inherently confusing, but their technical…
Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels? So today we are going to do a deep dive into…
I enjoy consuming and participating at Hacker News by Y Combinator resp. Paul Graham .
No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…
Why Spaniards have dinner so late? A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
This post explains the project's motivation from several perspectives. Unix shell is an old and successful technology, so there are many ways of looking at it.
What are home row mods? What is a mod-tap? What settings do you need to use? What are the alternatives? And more in this article...
What is threaded code? What is it good for? What are the differences between the various threading techniques? How do I implement threaded code portably? How fast are various threading techniques?
This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...
If you've listened to the anti-Microsoft crowd, you've probably heard this phrase. A web search returns a wide range of attributions, everything from an alleged battle cry to just short of an official company motto. The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of…
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
In this blogpost I argue why it's strongly recommended to use ZFS with ECC memory when building a NAS. I would argue that if you do not use ECC memory, it's reasonable to also forgo on ZFS altogether and use any (legacy) file system that suits your needs.
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
The Digital Imprimatur
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
The Man in Blue showcases the writing and Web design of Cameron Adams.
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, E…
After 300 comments and counting, it’s safe to agree with Nigel Kinbrum that my recent critique of Dr. Robert Lustig’s fructose lecture “has caused a bit of a stir in the nutritional blogosphere.” The intense debate (& discussion) that ensued inspired me to re-cap some things I feel were most interesting. There was…
Here is some practical evidence: According to the most recent 2002 North American Developer Survey by Evans Data Corporation, over half the developers surveyed are using Java. About 1/7 of developers surveyed are using C#. Roughly half of those also use Java, so the fraction of surveyed developers using one or both is…
