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How Generative Music Works
For his 1965 composition “It's Gonna Rain”, Steve Reich designed a generative mechanical system.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 716 posts.
392
Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm? (2010)
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
393
Opening the code of our X-Pack features
We are doubling down on open and moving our closed source X-Pack code into our public GitHub repos.
394
Adding an Effect System to OCaml [video]
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider with a unique focus on technology and collaborative problem solving.
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Open source confronts its midlife crisis
Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood – and you try to…
397
The Future of Transmit iOS
Hello. Here’s an update on Transmit iOS that I promise will not use the words “sunset” or “journey”.
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Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
400
Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links
Understand how you will be impacted by our decision to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.
401
Audio Adversarial Examples
Figure from our paper: given any waveform, we can modify it slightly to produce another (similar) waveform that transcribes as any different target phrase.
402
The Shirky Principle (2010)
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
403
Mtime comparison considered harmful
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
404
Bringing AMP to Gmail
We’re bringing the power of AMP to email through the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email—a new way for developers to make emails more interactive and engaging.
405
Implementing and Understanding Type Classes (2014)
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
406
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
407
Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
408
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
409
YubiKey comes to the iPhone with Mobile SDK for iOS and LastPass support
YubiKey iOS support is here. For developers, we now offer Yubico Mobile SDK for iOS, and LastPass supports the YubiKey NEO over NFC on iOS.
410
Making art with SSH key randomart
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
411
Generate ASCII RFC-like header diagrams for your own custom protocols
Protocol is a command-line tool to display ASCII RFC-like protocol header diagrams for both existing network protocols or user-defined ones (using a very simple syntax). Protocol is written in Python and it's open-source software.
412
MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
413
History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
414
The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
415
Evolving Chrome's security indicators
Previously, we posted a proposal to mark all HTTP pages as definitively “not secure” and remove secure indicators for HTTPS pages. HTTPS us...
416
Why I’m done with Chrome
This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from …
417
The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
The tech industry, especially the security industry, seems outrageously overwhelming to newcomers and even as an intermediate “InfoSec Pro” there seems to be an overwhelming number of paths and topics one can focus on. The problem most of us, especially newcomers, encounter is that we don’t know what to focus on. Even…
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LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
420
Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…