2071
Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source"
The original call to switch to the term `open source'.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
2072
Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
2073
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
The numbers clearly show this is a pointless distraction for the climate movement
2074
E-mail addresses as user IDs: stupid policy
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
2075
How Protothreads Really Work
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
2076
Hubble
If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be?
2077
Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution
Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
2078
A performance comparison of Judy to hash tables
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
2079
The Missing Missing Reasons
Members of estranged parents’ forums often say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children did tell them why. But the reasons their children give—the infamous missing reasons—are missing.
2080
Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation
Thunderbird provides an open-source, cross-platform email alternative for those of us who still use stand-alone email clients (and I am one). It’s trust-worthy, it’s under your control, and it’s built to reflect the Mozilla mission. Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of…
2081
Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
2082
Final Words on Tail Calls
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
2083
Why free monads matter
A tour of free monads and their motivating use cases
2084
JSMin isn't welcome on Google Code
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin ), Google Code would no longer host the project.
2085
GC support in Rust: API design
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
2086
AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
Fitts' Law, A fundamental principle of interaction design, from AskTog, the Webzine for Computer Professionals, their Family, and Friends
2087
Protecting Lives & Liberty: How Contact Tracing Can Foil COVID-19 & Big Brother
If you'd like to help translate this comic, click here to see what translations have already been done! If your language hasn't been done yet, send a Pull Request to that repo with your translated comic, or send it to . Thank you! 💖
2088
Simplicity
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacke…
2089
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
2090
Why FTL implies time travel
In science fiction, it is pretty standard fare to introduce some form of faster-than-light communication or travel. After all, space is big, and you can't write your swashbuckling Hornblower-in-space novel if you have to wait for a generation ship to crawl painfully slowly between the nearest stars,
2091
Knuth: Recent News
Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write…
2092
Fighting the @font-face FOUT
FOUT is what I’m calling the flash of unstyled text that you get while using @font-face in Firefox and Opera.
2093
I Knew How To Validate An Email Address Until I Read The RFC
Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.
2094
The context sensitivity of C's grammar
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
2095
The Elephant in the Bath-House
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
2096
RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
[LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
2097
Quote Origin: Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
2098
A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme
Yesterday’s post about code syntax color schemes got me thinking about what is perhaps the ultimate color scheme, Windows 3.1’s “Hot Dog Stand”: The truly funny thing about this color scheme is that all the other Windows 3.1 color schemes are surprisingly rational, totally reasonable color
2099
2100
John Resig - Simple JavaScript Inheritance
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…