SSC Gives A Graduation Speech
[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects] [Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case] Ladies an…
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects] [Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case] Ladies an…
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
Link to: https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman
In The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Charlie Munger explains why we behave the way we do. This is a transcript of the fully updated talk.
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
JavaScript , aka Mocha, aka LiveScript, aka JScript, aka ECMAScript, is one of the world's most popular programming languages. Virtually every personal computer in the world has at least one JavaScript interpreter installed on it and in active use. JavaScript's popularity is due entirely to its role as the scripting…
"Dude, are you doing the Dove ad now ? That was so April 15th...?" Yes, I realize I missed the meme train, but it's better to be right than part of the debate, especially when there is no debate, this is all a short con inside a 50+ year long con. Remember House Of Games ? "It's called a confidence game. Why, because…
In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.
Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…
This article outlines the responsibilities of users, including employees, students, and faculty, who create and maintain personal webpages to ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and accessible to all users.
You should always change doors when playing Monty Hall
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online. It took some doing. There is comedy. First, the fun stuff: Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected…
A review of Javascript performance. Part 1 - Techempower Rankings.
NIST is no longer recommending two-factor authentication systems that use SMS, because of their many insecurities. In the latest draft of its Digital Authentication Guideline, there’s the line: [Out of band verification] using SMS is deprecated, and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance.
Ok, so here's where I tell all about how I (now we) got to be tied for third place on the netflix prize . And I don't mean a sordid tale of computing in the jungle, but rather the actual math and methods. So yes, after reading this post, you too should be able to rank in the top ten or so.
Towards the tail end of PubCon, I noticed a spate of articles talking about subdomains and subdirectories in Google, and I wanted to talk more about this subject in case I was unclear. Historically…
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
I've written previously about the problem recursive descent parsers have with expressions, especially when the language has multiple levels of operator precedence.
Do you have a wearable computer? Are you interested in alternate keyboard layouts but too lazy to learn Dvorak? Do you masturbate at your desk? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you ma…
One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive"…
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
An in-depth, factual analysis of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. Discover the dangerous advice, factual errors, & misleading claims exposed by John T Reed.
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper describing their results: collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash…
Nature Medicine paper revisited: And it is shocking