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Oklab: A perceptual color space for image processing
From personal project to industry standard Introduction added in 2025 When introduced Oklab in 2020, I never expected it to reach as far as...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 904 posts.
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Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6
2020-05-26: MongoDB identified a bug in the transaction retry mechanism which they believe was responsible for the anomalies observed in this report; a patch is scheduled for 4.2.8.
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The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
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Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
Wikipedia's "NPOV" is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call "false balance."
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"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out"
These are questions that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me. Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
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The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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No Cookie for You
The developer community remains the heart of GitHub, and we’re committed to respecting the privacy of developers using our product.
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Your Computer Isn't Yours
There have been several updates appended to this page as of 2020-11-16, please see below. Also available in: Türkçe Français Español Português Português…
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Bread, How Did They Make It?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020120 points32 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
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CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation (2011)
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information
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Firefox and Chromium
Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…
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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
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Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
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Lab-made? CoV2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
In most places, power from new renewables is now cheaper than new fossil fuels.
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Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems
Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var , and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.
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Plastic Pollution
How much plastic ends up in the ocean? Where does it come from?
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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
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Full third-party cookie blocking and more
This blog post covers several enhancements to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in iOS and iPadOS 13.4 and Safari 13.1 on macOS to address our latest discoveries in the industry around tracking.
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What Is Zig's “Colorblind” Async/Await?
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
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COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the world. Explore global data and research to understand its impact, spread, and global response.
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Jukebox
We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (2010)
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
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Peppering (Password Storage)
Website with the collection of all the cheat sheets of the project.
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Novel Coronavirus situation reports
The Weekly Epidemiological Update provides an overview of the global, regional and country-level COVID-19 cases and deaths, highlighting key data and trends; as well as other pertinent epidemiological information concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.