Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
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The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems . Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source.
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
Slides and videos explaining a functional approach to error handling
Robots.txt files were invented 20+ years ago to help advise “robots," mostly search engine web crawlers, which sections of a web site should be crawled and indexed for search. Many sites use their robots.txt files to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) by excluding duplicate content like print versions of…
In addition to the end-to-end encryption that protects every Signal message, the Signal service is designed to minimize the data that is retained about Signal users. By design, it does not store a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, ...
This article is part of a 3-part series on trimodal compensation: * Part 1: The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021, this article) * Part 2: The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (2024, this article) * Part 3: The trimodal nature of tech compensation in
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
March 2007 (This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.) We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have…
There are some pretty strong statements about types floating around out there. The claims range from the oft-repeated phrase that when you get the types to line up, everything just works, to “not relying on type safety is unethical (if you have an SLA)” 1 , " It boils down to cost vs benefit, actual studies, and…
Starting September 30, 2020, you can configure Firefox for Android Nightly to install extensions listed on addons.mozilla.org.
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for…
Experience macOS just like before
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
Is it just me? I mean, do you ever wonder about the stories behind everyday products?
This page collects resources about implementing regular expression search efficiently.
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.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020cited by 42History & Retro Computing details
This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
