Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 822 posts.
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
Google’s first custom-designed co-processor for consumer products is built into every Pixel 2. Soon, it will enable more applications to use Pixel 2’s camera for taking …
Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…
Traditionally, software is produced in this way: write some code, maybe do some code review, run unit-tests, and then hope it is correct. Hard experience shows that it is very ...
The case is simple: Do you have a 45 Mbps, bi-directional service to your home, paying around $40? Do you have 500+ channels and can choose any competitive service? You paid an estimated $2000 for this product even though you did not receive it and it may never be available. Do you want your money back and the…
I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here: Curr…
Facebook has long had too much power, but Mark Zuckerberg’s expressed willingness to use said power for political ends means it’s time to consider countermeasures.
Understanding how people use their devices often helps in improving the user experience. However, accessing the data that provides such…
Python code insights. Visual Studio IDE analyzes your code to make suggestions. Manage 3rd party libraries. Interativey debug on Windows and Linux. Much more!
How Postgres’ concurrency model coupled with long-lived transactions can degrade the performance of indexes on hot tables in your database.
The section below about safe area insets was updated on Oct 31, 2017 to reflect changes in the iOS 11.2 beta.
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
I’ve been doing the local usergroup circuit with this lately and have been asked to write it up.
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
Today, we deployed HTTPS by default on Stack Overflow. All traffic is now redirected to https:// and Google links will change over the next few weeks. The ac...
Americans nearly universally speed, and excess speed is a factor in many accidents. But what if higher speed limits made roads safer?
Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last year, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
