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The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
2612
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
2613
Redundancy vs. dependencies: which is worse? (2008)
I think that all other considerations are of the extrinsic real-world kind – domain modeling, usability, schedules, platforms, etc. I also think that I can show how any "good" programming practice is mainly aimed at minimizing redundancy, dependencies, or both. I even think that you can tell a "good" programmer from a…
2614
How Erlang does scheduling
In this, I describe why Erlang is different from most other language runtimes. I also describe why it often forgoes throughput for lower la...
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Thoughts on macOS Package Managers
Saagar Jha's website.
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OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better
2620
Standing Up For Android
Shifty Jelly’s counterargument to some of my Android opinions, which provides a concrete data point showing that money can be made on Android, concludes with this:
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The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
2623
The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)
Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
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What is Electricity? (1996)
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
2626
The Holy Trinity: Logic, Languages, Categories (2011)
The Christian doctrine of trinitarianism states that there is one God that is manifest in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who together form the Holy Trinity. The doctrine…
2627
Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data
Data files are derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus , as described by Thorsten Brants and Alex Franz, and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
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How to compile with continuations
In terms of unreasonable effectiveness, the transformation to continuation-passing style (CPS) ranks with the Y combinator .
2630
Why GitHub is not your CV
Two days ago, Ashe Dryden published an article I’ve been desperately wishing someone would write for months: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community . It’s a detailed, well-researched take-down of the seemingly quite popular myth that open-source contributions are a useful way to screen candidates for…
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The Expression Problem and its solutions (2016)
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
2632
The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
2633
The Caves of Clojure
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
2635
We stand to save $7M over five years from our cloud exit
Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we've been busy at work making it so. After a brief detour down a blind alley with an enterprise Kubernetes provider, we found our stride building our own tools, and successfully moved the first small application out of the cloud a few weeks ago. Now our…
2636
The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
2637
Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance
Dr Craig Steven Wright: interdisciplinary researcher, founder and research leader. Qualifications, programme-building and research across economics, law, computing and digital scarcity.
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How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings
Note: This flaw is different than the authentication flaw in Dropbox that Derek Newton recently published . Summary Dropbox , the popular cl...
2639
The Oh My God Particle
The Oh-My-God Particle
2640
OrmHate
Object-Relational Mappers get a lot of hate from people who misjudge the complexities of the task.