Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chrono…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
As I mentioned in my previous post , my Mastering Regular Expressions book was just reviewed on Slashdot . One thing that struck me in reading all the resulting comments was the (several different copies of an) apparently famous quote that goes something like:
SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined. Billions and billions of copies of SQLite exist in the wild. SQLite is found in:
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
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…
I will have eggs over easy with toast, please.
The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.
All the weeks in a human life shown on one chart.
Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.
Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better…
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
Tutorial for tying the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, in which the laces are formed into two loops, both of which are passed through the “hole” in the middle.
Clojure is a dynamic language. Among other things this means that type annotations are not required for code to run. While Clojure has some support for type hints, they are not an enforcement mechanism, nor comprehensive, and are limited to communicating information to the compiler to aid in efficient code generation…
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
A detailed explanation of Bézier curves, and how to do the many things that we commonly want to do with them.
Tutorial for tying the “Ian Knot”, the world's fastest shoelace knot.
Explore data on COVID-19 excess mortality across the world.
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate. We know from Google and…
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in
I have never had a Facebook account, or an Instagram account. There is a Facebook account called "Richard Stallman", but it is an impostor.
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2023335 points75 commentscited by 37Society, Policy & Culture details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
