Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
Here's a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static analysis tools ) that has good support for macros plus decent-ish support for FP, plus a lot more. What's not to like? I'm mostly not going to talk about how great Julia…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021172 points154 commentscited by 23History & Retro Computing details
This is Part I of a seven part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Gloss., Retrospective) comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state. Toda…
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is…
Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical…
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…
If someone knows even a little about Spanner, the first question they have is: "How does CockroachDB provide external consistency without atomic clocks?"
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
Idioms and patterns for handling errors in Go.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
This post is part of the series “Debris: Opening the box”. Okay, previous posts from this series aimed to actually convey useful technical information: assuming you actually want to wri…
Yesterday several people asked my opinion of a preprint claiming to solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in deterministic polynomial time. I responded: If I read all such papers, then I wouldn’t hav…
Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board.
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
Website with the collection of all the cheat sheets of the project.
I spend a lot of my time (easily over 8 hours a day) at a keyboard. As you might have guessed from my previous entries about Vim and Mutt I'm not averse to spending a few hours to improve an environment I'm going to be spending tens of thousands of hours in over the next few years, so it shouldn't be a shock that my…
npm Blog (Archive); updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog
Threading macros, also known as arrow macros, convert nested function calls into a linear flow of function calls, improving readability.
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
Why a programming language should not offer a primitive to capture undelimited continuations (call/cc).
Wow, no comments? They must all be stuck on that bit about the "home row." Oh well... here's hoping some of those non-typists make it all the way through this piece.
October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.) Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup…
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
A couple days ago, I saw a post about polyphasic sleep on LifeHack.org . Since then I’ve been emailed about this topic as well, probably because I’ve written previously about becoming an early riser .
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.
WSL 2 is a new architecture that allows for dramatic file system performance and full system call compatibility in WSL using a Linux kernel.
Since 2023, an average of 62% of Americans report owning stock, a rebound after more than a decade of lower readings.
