301
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
302
Coding Machines
After a minute Patrick came back with a small dusty cardboard box. Dave and I stared as Patrick opened it and pulled out a network switch, the old kind from the days when they were made with metal cases. He plugged in the power supply and carefully straightened out a CAT -5 cable to hook the switch up to our network…
303
Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of…
304
Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts
One of Lisp's great features is its condition system. It serves a similar purpose to the exception handling systems in Java, Python, and C++ but is more flexible. In fact, its flexibility extends beyond error handling--conditions are more general than exceptions in that a condition can represent any occurrence during…
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Rethinking PID 1 (2010)
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
307
Deaths per TWH by energy source
I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares…
308
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
309
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 …
310
New Programming Jargon
Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs
311
Energy Production and Consumption
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
312
Evidence Based Scheduling
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce t…
313
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work . I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the…
314
What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
315
The Top Idea in Your Mind
July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower. Everyone who's worked on difficult…
316
Files Are Hard
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
317
Scaling Mercurial at Facebook
Visit the post for more.
318
Cool URIs don't change (1998)
There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.
319
GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
320
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
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Warren Buffett's bet against hedge funds at the Long Now Foundation (2008-17)
will go to Girls Incorporated of Omaha if Buffett wins, or Friends of Absolute Return for Kids, Inc if Protege Partners, LLC wins.
323
The Road to 2M Websocket Connections in Phoenix (2015)
If you have been paying attention on Twitter recently, you have likely seen some increasing numbers regarding the number of simultaneous connections the Phoenix web framework can handle. This post documents some of the techniques used to perform the benchmarks.
324
Blogging about Midori (2015)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
325
1. Trends in income and wealth inequality
Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating streak that…
326
FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
327
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
328
Why Many Cities Have No Money
Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes. We're in a predicament.
329
Parsing JSON is a Minefield
[2016-10-26] First version of the article [2016-10-28] Presentation at Soft-Shake Conference, Geneva ( slides ) [2016-11-01] Article and comments in The Register [2017-11-16] Presentation at Black Alps Security Conference, Yverdon ( slides ) [2018-03-09] Presentation at Toulouse Hacking Conference ( slides )…
330
Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments