Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
It’s the first half of 2021 – nearly five years since the “first half of 2016” – but in many ways not much has changed. The United Kingdom is still trying to figure out Brexit, another Justin Bieber song hit #1 on the charts (is it too late now to say sorry?), and Signal still doesn’t really know...
171 words every programmer should understand
It’s funny - I have shared this story a handful of times with friends of mine who are qualified, competent software engineers, and each time the response was confusion about why any of this would be necessary or even remotely helpful. WebAssembly ?!
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
A compressed 8KB docs index in AGENTS.md achieved 100% on Next.js 16 API evals. Skills maxed at 79%. Here's what we learned and how to set it up.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
The CA/Browser Forum has officially voted to amend the TLS Baseline Requirements to set a schedule for shortening both the lifetime of TLS certificates.
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be…
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by…
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million . Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other…
Back in January, I used an old Thinkpad while my 12” Macbook was being repaired. I found myself really enjoying some aspects of it. This nudged me down a path that ended with me modding a frankenpad…
We would like to provide important clarifications regarding the case of the climate activist who was arrested by French police.
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
McDonald’s is one of the biggest real estate companies in the world. It owns $28.4 billion worth of land and buildings (before depreciation).
Since our first release in 2002, there have been 69 security bugs in Firefox’s style component. If we'd had a time machine and could have written this component in Rust from the start, 51% wouldn't have happened. That said, Rust is not foolproof. Developers still need to be aware of correctness bugs and data leakage…
On Being A Journeyman Software Developer2013463 points177 commentscited by 9Life, Learning & Writing details
Yesterday I made a mistake . Without thinking, I put up a mean tweet about some code that Heather Arthur wrote. And I want to apologize. ...
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…
I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s new GPT-3 language model. When I got beta access, the first thing I wondered was, how human is GPT-3? How close is it ...
Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental…
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...
For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been producing data and lessons on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives.
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
