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Massacring C Pointers (2018)
I'm taking a break from debugging books to talk about a calamitous shitshow of textbook writing: Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power , by Robert J. Traister.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
8012
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
8013
SQL as an API language
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
8014
Network Transparency with Wayland
M. Stoeckl's website
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How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]?
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
8021
Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
8022
Year of the Voice – Chapter 2: Let's talk
Talk to your smart home and let it talk back with our new voice assistant features.
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Data Runner Watch Prototype – Modded Casio F91W
Today I want to show you a watch modification that I've been working on. I'm calling it the Data Runner, and it's another F91W mod, this time going the extra mile to make something functional and nice looking.
8024
Codecov Bash Uploader compromised
Update 4/29/2021 3PM PT : Through our investigation, we now have additional information concerning what environment variables may have been obtained without authorization and how they may have been used. Affected users can view details within the Codecov application. Additionally, we have posted our most up-to-date…
8025
VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents
You can no longer assume a mere VM will contain a sufficiently advanced AI agent.
8026
Tips for immersive video calls
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with.
8027
John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
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Julia as a CLI Calculator
I have been using the Julia REPL as my day-to-day calculator on the command line for more than a year now. I am surprised that I haven’t seen more posts talking about how powerful and extensible the language is for simple numerical calculations and scripting In fact, the Julia REPL is much more than a simple…
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Text only news websites (2022)
There's no BBC News text-only site, even though everyone comes here looking for one – more info
8030
Adobe, Apple, and Flash
If Adobe needs Apple to grant them further access to the hardware to make the *Mac* version of Flash Player better, what are the odds that they’d get that sort of low-level hardware access on the iPhone OS? (Hint: zero.)
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MuZero: Mastering Go, chess, shogi and Atari without rules
In 2016, we introduced AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence (AI) program to defeat humans at the ancient game of Go. Two years later, its successor - AlphaZero - learned from scratch to master Go, chess and shogi. Now, in a paper in the journal Nature, we describe MuZero, a significant step forward in the…
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Using JDK 9 Memory Order Modes
This guide is mainly intended for expert programmers familiar with Java concurrency, but unfamiliar with the memory order modes available in JDK 9 provided by VarHandles. Mostly, it focuses on how to think about modes when developing parallel software. Feel free to first read the Summary .
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Re-writing the site of Norway's largest transport provider in Elm
Vy, the largest transport provider in Norway, has been using Elm for the last couple of years. These are their experiences so far.
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Microsoft's Xandr grants GDPR rights at a rate of 0%
noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding transparency issues, the right of access and the use of inaccurate information about users
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Wounded QR Codes
How do QR codes work? How much is it possible to distort one and still have it readable?
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JEP 450: Compact Object Headers
Reduce the size of object headers in the HotSpot JVM from between 96 and 128 bits down to 64 bits on 64-bit architectures. This will reduce heap size, improve deployment density, and increase data locality.
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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and dentistry—but it is…
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Web Storage: the lesser evil for session tokens
I was recently asked whether it was safe to store session tokens using Web Storage (sessionStorage/localStorage) instead of cookies. Upon googling this I found the top results nearly all assert that w