Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate…
I think it’s time to remind people that D. J. Bernstein is the greatest programmer in the history of the world.
Websites in South Korea often require installation of “security applications.” Not only do these mandatory applications not help security, way too often they introduce issues.
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
Some bugs look so impossible you start blaming the OS, the tools, or the compiler. This post digs into three of them.
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only…
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
This is a bit long. Apologies. I'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing a reply this morning to the letter that follows...
A 2016 technical analysis of the 16GB RAM limit in Intel MacBook Pro models, including Phil Schiller’s direct response and two corrections.
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
Most of the comments in this semicolons in JS exchange make me sad. The code in question:
Digital, but still a barbarous relic.
Butterick’s Practical Typography
I’ve programmed systems in many different languages; from assembler to Java. I’ve written programs in binary machine language. I’ve written applications in Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, C, Pascal, C++, Java, Lua, Smalltalk, Logo, and dozens of other languages. I’ve used statically typed languages, with lots of type inference…
How do software developers understand which parts of their software are being used and whether they are performing as expected? The modern answer is telemetry , which means software sending data to answer those questions back to a collection server. This post is about why I believe telemetry is important for…
My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
A few years ago, Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and I built an open-source laptop, Novena, from the circuit boards up, and shared our designs with the world. I’m a strong proponent of open hardware, because sharing knowledge is sharing power. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how much the press wanted to frame our open hardware…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
