Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
A long-standing objection to making bulk changes to code using automated tools (e.g. to conform to a given code style) is that it clutters the output of git blame. With git 2.23, this does not have to be the case anymore! In this post I will start by explaining the value of git blame and […]
The rise of agile methods (particularly XP) makes some people wonder if there's any role left for software design. I argue that this change shifts from planned to evolutionary design.
QubesOS provides a desktop operating system made up of multiple virtual machines, running under Xen. To protect against buggy network drivers, the …
Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…
Stanford researchers have determined that average human body temperature in the United States has decreased since the 1800s.
Braintree’s Bryan Johnson will answer your questions in the comments section. In 2003, Bryan Johnson (right) was hired for a commission-only job selling credit card services to businesses. “I was broke,” says Johnson. “The job was brutal. Business owners were tired of the industry’s decep…
At this time last year, the TLS world was mostly running on RC4-SHA and AES-CBC. The Lucky 13 attack against CBC in TLS had just been published and I had spent most of January writing patches for OpenSSL and NSS to implement constant-time CBC decoding. The RC4 biases paper is still a couple of week away, but it's…
Describing content blocking rules in a structured format ahead-of-time, rather than running extension-provided code.
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
DeepSeek R1, available through the model catalog on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, enables businesses to seamlessly integrate advanced AI.
A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sort…
Posted by David Silver and Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMindGames are a great testing ground for developing smarter, more flexible algorithms that ha...
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. More than anyone really has any right to train. As I’ve spent these hours observing the effects of tweaking various model configurations and h
Lisp has been supporting the world's most complex applications since 1958. And Lisp has grown a lot since then. So if you or someone you know harbors fears or concerns about Lisp because of something learned in a class or muttered by a friend 20 or 30 years ago, it's time to take a fresh look. In this paper we're…
Posted by John Rae-Grant, Product Manager Have you ever wondered why Gmail asks you before showing images in emails? We did this to protec...
You may have heard last week how Innokenty Mihailov’s great Enumerable::Lazy feature was accepted into the Ruby 2.0 code base. But you may not have heard about an even more significant change that was merged into Ruby 2.0 in January: a new algorithm for garbage collection called “Bitmap Marking.” The developer behind…
Tagged pointers are an interesting technology used to increase performance and reduce memory usage. As of OS X 10.10, NSString got the tagged pointer treatment, and today I'm going to take a look at how it works, a topic suggested by Ken Ferry.
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color: (1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry ; (2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L , M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram ; and (3) the…
Why we're joining the Git community and updating "master" to "main".
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
