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Rust's Type System Is Turing-Complete: Type-Level Programming in Rust
(N.B. The word “fuck” appears multiple times in this post. I recommend that the reader temporarily not consider “fuck” as profanity, as it isn’t used that way here.)
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
182
Who is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author?
On September 22, 2016, this site was forced offline for nearly four days after it was hit with “ Mirai ,” a malware strain that enslaves poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices like wireless routers and security cameras into a botnet for use in large cyberattacks. Roughly a week after that assault, the…
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Driving for Uber and Lyft
About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. A…
186
Better than Free (2008)
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
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Realizing Hackett, a metaprogrammable Haskell
Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…
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Metaclasses: Thoughts on generative C++
I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here: Curr…
190
Manifestos and Monopolies
Facebook has long had too much power, but Mark Zuckerberg’s expressed willingness to use said power for political ends means it’s time to consider countermeasures.
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Postgres Job Queues and Failure by MVCC
How Postgres’ concurrency model coupled with long-lived transactions can degrade the performance of indexes on hot tables in your database.
193
TruffleRuby on the Substrate VM
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
194
Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
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Dangers of CSV Injection
I’ve been doing the local usergroup circuit with this lately and have been asked to write it up.
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FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
198
Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
199
HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road
Today, we deployed HTTPS by default on Stack Overflow. All traffic is now redirected to https:// and Google links will change over the next few weeks. The ac...
200
A Year of Google and Apple Maps
Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last year, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:
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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
202
Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
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My Go Resolutions for 2017
’Tis the season for resolutions, and I thought it would make sense to write a little about what I hope to work on this year as far as Go is concerned.
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A Clash of Cultures
There’s an Internet controversy going on between Dale Dougherty, the CEO of Maker Media and Naomi Wu ( @realsexycyborg ), a Chinese Maker and Internet personality. Briefly, Dale Doughtery tweeted a single line questioning Naomi Wu’s authenticity, which is destroying Naomi’s reputation and livelihood in China.
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If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
207
LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
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What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?
Some notes on the different patterns that may be present when people talk about event-driven architectures.
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Algorithmic Solution to My Insomnia
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels…
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Better Compression with Zstandard
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…