Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
We use our smartphone for private conversations, store our contacts and organise our meetings with it. The access to all this sensitive data is handled with the so-called permissions. It means, for example, that each app that requires the smartphone camera needs to get the corresponding permission first. Many of the…
AVIF is the first browser image format we've had in 10 years. Let's see how it performs…
QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new encrypted-by-default Internet transport protocol, that provides a number of improvements designed to accelerate HTTP traffic as well as make it more secure, with the intended goal of eventually replacing TCP and TLS on the web.
An overview of what I've been doing as part of my internship at Spotify in NYC this summer: using convolutional neural networks for audio-based music recommendation.
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
When I wrote the introductory article for libjit , I aimed it at programmers who know what JITs are, at least to some extent. I did mention what a JIT is, but only very briefly. The purpose of this article is to provide a better introductory overview of JITing, with code samples that don't rely on any libraries.
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.
Go 1.21 is the first perfectly reproducible Go toolchain.
Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…
One of the major features we introduced in the TextSecure v2 release was private group chat. We believe that group chat is an important feature for encrypted communications projects, so we wanted to try to summarize some of the existing work in this area, as well as how TextSecure’s group chat pr...
When it comes to designing secure protocols, I have a principle that goes like this: if you have to perform any cryptographic operation before verifying the MAC on a message you’ve received, it will somehow inevitably lead to doom.
Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four points to 36% since last year, making it the second-lowest reading in Gallup's trend.
I think we have an answer on whether AIs will reshape work....
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
There’s some recent discussion about the sky falling for XMPP at Google. See this blog post by Dan York for example. In reality, we don’t know the state of XMPP inside Google because they don’t share their use of XMPP with the XSF. …
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Hello! I’m going to tell you about monads, and how we can uncover them by refactoring our Ruby code.
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
We explore language models that recursively call themselves or other LLMs before providing a final answer. The aim is essentially unbounded context, and a way through context rot.
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
After we announced Amber.js last week, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, to our attention. After some communication with the folks behind Amber Smalltalk, we started a discussion on Hacker News [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335916] about what we should
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
