Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…
Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…
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Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no…
I have a set of baseline CSS styles that come with me from project to project. In the past, I'd use a typical CSS reset, but times have changed, and I believe I have a better set of global styles!
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
When I built Finda , I wanted it to be fast — specifically, to respond to all user input within 16 milliseconds.
This guide aims to introduce newcomers and experienced programmers alike to the beauty of functional programming, starting with the simplest building blocks of software. You’ll need a computer, basic proficiency in the command line, a text editor, and an internet connection. By the end of this series, you’ll have a…
We’re taking first steps toward agentic commerce in ChatGPT with new ways for people, AI agents, and businesses to shop together.
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
Under civil forfeiture laws, police officers can take money from people with no proof of any wrongdoing, and without filing criminal charges. How does this work, and what happens to the money?
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
A series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.
Stephen Wolfram explores minimal models and their visualizations, aiming to explain the underneath functionality of neural nets and ultimately machine learning.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
