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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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Principal Component Analysis Explained Visually (2015)
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a technique used to emphasize variation and bring out strong patterns in a dataset. It's often used to make data easy to explore and visualize.
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Facebook Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Buy Tbh
Facebook is acquiring tbh, another burgeoning social network; regulators erred in allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, but there is no better place to start enforcing the law than now.
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Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
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Amazon’s New Customer
The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.
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Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-Time Analytics (2013)
Homer: There's three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!
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At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
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Deprecated Linux networking commands and their replacements
In my article detailing the command line utilities available for configuring and troubleshooting network properties on Windows and Linux, I mentioned some Linux tools that, while still included and…
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Building a QNX 7 Desktop
Describes the process of building a QNX 7 x86_64 machine from (almost) scratch.
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Tulips, Myths, and Cryptocurrencies
Did you hear the one about the tulip bubble? It’s almost certainly a myth. It is myths, though, that explain why cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
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Std::visit is everything wrong with modern C++
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
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What makes a good REPL?
Dear Reader: although this post mentions Clojure as an example, it is not specifically about Clojure; please do not make it part of a language war. If you know other configurations which allow for a productive REPL experience, please describe them in the comments!
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TreeMaker: Origami Design Software
In 1989, I wrote an article for the magazine Engineering & Science about the state of technical folding, which, even then, seemed to be progressing by leaps and bounds due to an infusion of scientific and mathematical principles. In recounting some of the connections between origami, math, and technology, I wrote:
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Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
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Three-Valued Logic
Making decision despite missing SQL data (NULL): How to avoid OR…IS NULL in the WHERE clause.
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Shell Has a Forth-Like Quality
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
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Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
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Smalltalk Envy
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
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Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
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The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
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Compile-Time Evaluation in the Zig System Programming Language
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
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The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
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Implementing strcmp, strlen, and strstr using SSE 4.2 instructions (2008)
Created 18 years ago by Peter Kankowski Last changed 17 years ago Contributors : Dap and Adam Messinger Filed under Low-level code optimization
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I Had My Electronics Seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection
After my trip in Hamburg, Germany, for the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress, I left Germany for t