Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,890 posts.
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
The huge gap between rising incomes at the top and stagnating pay for the rest of us shows that workers are no longer benefiting from their rising productivity. Before 1979, worker pay and productivity grew in tandem. But since 1979, productivity has grown eight times faster than typical worker pay (hourly…
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to…
Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently...
This rant is utterly idiotic. The great investment in literary allure is there in order to mask its hollow emptiness. Why should one class of words be put on a pedestal above another? Gee, I don't know, could it just be because natural languages ALL DO THE SAME? All natural languages have something called a WORD…
It is not uncommon, in the context of academic debates over computer science and Web standards topics, to see the publication of one or more “considered harmful” essays. These essays have existed in some form for more than three decades now, and it has become obvious that their time has passed. Because “considered…
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ].
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet…
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe…
March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A…
Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters succinctly channels the BDFL’s guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down.
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
