Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 644 posts.
Disqus has a history of using one tool for the job and hammering through everything. Until now, that tool has been Python. This mentality has been extremely beneficial for us since we are a small team. Everyone is able to jump in to any piece of our stack with minimal effort.
If you’ve seen Epic Games’ HTML5 port of ‘Epic Citadel’, you have no doubt been impressed by the amazing performance and level of detail. A lot of the code that ...
Rather than dressing data up, strip it down—remove to improve.
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
On November 4th, the HHVM team went on a 3-week performance and parity lockdown. The lockdown officially ended on November 22nd. Overall, this lockdown was a...
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
This past Wednesday marked a milestone in the evolution of Wikimedia’s Database infrastructure: the completion of the migration of the English and German Wikipedias, as well as Wikidata, to M…
Anonymity in the real world is very hard In late 2011 Hezbollah rolled up a CIA spy ring in Lebanon. This provides an interesting lesson in CIA …
More Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the government program that obtained telephone call logs and Internet communication records. Americans are split on whether leaker Edward Snowden did the right or wrong thing.
An interview with Felix Winkelmann about CHICKEN Scheme, the SPOCK Scheme-to-JavaScript compiler, and what motivates him to keep programming.
Asking, “Can I have coffee with you to pick your brain?” is probably the worst possible way to get a meeting with someone with a busy schedule. Here’s a better approach. —— Jason, an e…
I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…
One of the big features for Go 1.1 is the new scheduler, contributed by Dmitry Vyukov. The new scheduler has given a dramatic increase in performance for parallel Go programs and with nothing better to do, I figured I'd write something about it.
If you ignore the practical issues of computers like size, weight, cost, heat, and so on, what do you really need in a programming language? Let's play around with this question.
New paper: “Security Analysis of Pseudo-Random Number Generators with Input: /dev/random is not Robust, by Yevgeniy Dodis, David Pointcheval, Sylvain Ruhault, Damien Vergnaud, and Daniel Wichs. Abstract: A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is…
Let me start by warning you: This is a long post. I want to take you through the process of writing and designing the ConvertKit sales page. As you’ll see, I had a huge amount of help from Amy Hoy. Throughout the process she gave great advice on copywriting that I’d like to share here. […]
What if, instead of running a process-data program on this machine, we want to run it on another machine? No problem. We make a TCP connection to a process-data server on the remote machine. On the local machine, we have generate-data writing to the TCP connection, and consume-data reading from the TCP connection…
I started using a Nexus 4. I was going to go right back to my iPhone after a week. I was designing more and more Android interfaces at Twitter and realized I needed to more intimately grok Android UI paradigms.
