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Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting
Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
Do not use the ASCII character 0x60 (grave accent) as a left quotation mark together with 0x27 (apostrophe), because it will look silly with modern correct fonts.
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Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
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The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
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An obscure research project could accelerate innovation in language design
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
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Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
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Cars and second order consequences
Electric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesti
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The browser bugs and edge cases of HTTP/2 push
There are lots of edge cases I hadn't considered, and it's very inconsistent between browsers. Here's what I found…
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The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
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Restic Cryptography
tl;dr: this is not an audit and I take no responsibility for your backups, but I had a quick look at the crypto and I think I’m going to use restic for my personal backups.
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US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data
https://bit.ly/crazymobiledemo
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An off-grid social network
Open Source Freelancer
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Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)
Postgres Explain Visualizer (Pev) is a tool I wrote to make EXPLAIN output easier to grok. It creates a graphical representation of the query plan.
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How Booking.com manipulates users
Many websites and applications these days are designed to trick you into doing things that their creators want. Here are some examples from timewellspent.io:
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On React and WordPress
Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had sa…
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American Equity
I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of...
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Floating Point Visually Explained
While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…
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The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
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I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for
WebGL is, all things considered, a pretty decent API. It’s not a great API, but that’s just because OpenGL is also not a great API. It gives you raw access to the GPU and is pretty low-level. For those intimidated by something so low-level, there are quite a few higher-level engines like three.js and Unity which are…
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How HBO’s Silicon Valley Built “Not Hotdog” with TensorFlow, Keras and React Native
How we beat the state of the art to build a real-life A.I. app.
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Good at programming competitions does not equal good on the job [video]
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
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Bringing back the iPhone headphone jack, in China
I’ve spent the past four months in Shenzhen, China, modifying an iPhone 7 to add a fully functional headphone jack. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has done anything like this.