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The Whispering Earring
Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is ba...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
3272
Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5)
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
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I can't believe I'm praising Tcl (2008)
So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…
3274
Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
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A Spectre proof-of-concept for a Spectre-proof web
Posted by Stephen Röttger and Artur Janc, Information Security Engineers Three years ago, Spectre changed the way we think about security b...
3276
Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
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Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
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U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time
For the first time in Gallup's polling history, less than half of U.S. adults report belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque.
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The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very…
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Cryptographic Agility
( These are notes that I wrote up from a talk that I gave at the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience . You can tell that it was in Washington, DC because of the “cyber”.
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Startup Failure Post-Mortems
It's hard to say goodbye. Find out how 483 startups have failed and why in the words of their investors and founders.
3288
One sentence per line, please
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
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In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
3291
Dual N-Back Meta-analysis
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.
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The New Normal: 200-400 Gbps DDoS Attacks
Over the past four years, KrebsOnSecurity has been targeted by countless denial-of-service attacks intended to knock it offline. Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity was hit by easily the most massive and intense such attack yet — a nearly 200 Gbps assault leveraging a simple attack method that industry experts say is…
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WireGuard for Windows Pre-Alpha Is Available
Users of kernels < 5.6 may also choose wireguard-lts or wireguard-dkms + linux-headers , depending on which kernel is used.
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Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up (2008)
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
3296
Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
CHAPTER from SKIN IN THE GAME
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Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
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Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe
We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.
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Technical Issues of Separation in Lisp Function Cells and Value Cells (1988)
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
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