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The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 277 posts.
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Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
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As I remember London
As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice…
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Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
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The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
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The Chaos (1922)
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
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Entropy Attacks
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
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Death by a Thousand Slops
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter … Continue reading…
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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light
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Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time
How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out! You can use * for wildcards, foo|bar for sums, and a word is defined as \<[[:alnum:]_]+\> (ignoring case, considering accents).
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DHH Is Worse Than I Thought
DHH's politics are not normal. Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.
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The Ruby community has a DHH problem
The Ruby community can no longer afford to stand silent in the face of DHH and his toxic ideas.
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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison20251,750 points1,049 commentscited by 16Society, Policy & Culture details
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.
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Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
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Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.
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FAA Biographical Assessment
could you pass the FAA's Air Traffic Controller (ATC) biographical assessment?
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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk ‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so…
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AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.
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NSA and IETF: Can an attacker purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?
It's normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement .