2101
Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
2102
Five Questions about Language Design
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
2103
Representing Code
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
2104
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
2105
Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
2106
Language Log: Shakespeare used <B><I>they</I></B> with singular antecedents so there
Not happy that I cite Sean Lennon as a source of evidence concerning the way they can be used in modern English? Feeling that only something 400 years older would really convince you that it's OK. Has Coby Lubliner got news for you! Coby writes from Berkeley to point out the following lines from Shakespeare's A Comedy…
2107
Urbit: functional programming from scratch
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
2108
Performance is a Feature
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
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2111
P.S.: The Best of Intentions
Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.
2112
Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
2113
How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
2114
Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
2115
Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
2116
On Covering Webcams
The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.
2117
Reading List: Fog Creek Software Management Training Program
The management training program we’re starting up here at Fog Creek will take about three years and will be relatively intensive. Among other things, there will be a required reading list con…
2118
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
2119
Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
2120
The AI water issue is fake
On the national, local, and personal level
2121
Parallelogram
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
2122
How to design a proper USB-C™ power sink (hint, not the way Raspberry Pi 4 did it)
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
2123
The Relativistic Rocket
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
2124
Steve Blank If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote…
2125
FreeBSD on EC2 status
For lists of FreeBSD AMI IDs, please consult the appropriate FreeBSD release announcement; you can also launch FreeBSD through the AWS Marketplace .
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2127
Even God Couldn't Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging
A market timing strategy rarely outperforms dollar cost averaging even when that strategy knows exactly when to buy.
2128
Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
2129
Ketamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
2130
The Last Psychiatrist: Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World
This is a brilliant campaign, for technical and artistic reasons. What is the brand that it conveys? Heirloom quality .