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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
6692
Docker is updating and extending our product subscriptions
Docker announces significant upgrades to its subscription plans, delivering more value, flexibility, and tools for customers of all sizes.
6693
Pretty State Machine Patterns in Rust (2016)
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
6694
A better merge workflow with Jujutsu
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
6695
An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's.
6696
Non-Lexical Lifetimes in Rust
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
6697
On WebKit Security Updates
Linux distributions have a problem with WebKit security. Major desktop browsers push automatic security updates directly to users on a regular basis, so most users don't have to worry about security updates. But Linux users are dependent on their distributions to release updates. Apple fixed over 100 vulnerabilities…
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Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
6701
Starlink is a big deal
Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the…
6702
Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? (2016)
Algebra is no longer being taught to San Francisco eighth graders. Is the tech capital of the world dumbing down its STEM education?
6703
Modular Errors in Rust
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
6704
Introducing the Europe Region, Now Available in Public Beta
Today we’re happy to announce Heroku’s Europe region, available in public beta. With more than 3 million apps running on our platform from developers all..
6705
How Bad Is Your Colormap? (2014)
What this function does is to give you a lumninance-correct grayscale version of any matplotlib colormap. I've found this useful for quickly checking how my plots might appear if printed in black and white, but I think it's probably even more useful for stoking the flame of the internet's general rant against jet .
6706
Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically (2023)
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
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Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome
Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching?
6709
Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists
Linked lists look harmless until they start detonating your game at runtime. This is the bug pattern far too many programmers miss.
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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
6712
Co-routines as an alternative to state machines (2009)
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
6713
Security and privacy risks of public JavaScript CDNs
Once upon a time, loading common scripts & styles from a public CDN like cdnjs or Google's Hosted Libraries was a 'best practice' - a great way to instantly...
6714
TikTok: Logs, Logs, Logs
We are in 2020 and the US president is about to ban TikTok, a video-sharing social network mobile app, because “it poses a risk to US…
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The Decline and Fall of IBM
Bob's new eBook, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is finally available on Amazon.com.
6717
Dangling by a Trivial Feature
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
6718
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the world’s largest nonprofit membership organization serving all individuals who create games. We advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating for the…
6719
Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
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