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8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
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Spaced repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Text rendering hates you (2019)
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020272 points68 commentscited by 20History & Retro Computing details
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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Doom 3 Source code review
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
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C’s Biggest Mistake (2009)
C is arguably the world’s most successful programming language. Its success has, of course, endlessly tempted people to improve upon it. Thus, C is probably the patriarch of the longest list of languages. Notable among these are C++, the D programming language, and most recently, Go. There are endless discussion…
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Tarsnap critical security bug
There's a lot to say about this, and it's entirely possible that I'll miss covering some important points in this post; if I've missed something, please email me or post a comment below and I'll do my best to add the necessary information.
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
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JavaScript Isn't Scheme
It seems like I can’t spend five minutes on reddit these days without someone playing the JS-is-Scheme is card . I see everything from the innocuous, “JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme”, all the way up to, “JavaScript is basically Scheme.” This is basically crazy. Or, at least it has a lot in common with…
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RMS lifestyle
I do not have a favorite food, a favorite book, a favorite song, a favorite joke, a favorite flower, or a favorite butterfly. My tastes don't work that way.
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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
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Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)
MMAP Databases = 💩
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The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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What Made Lisp Different (2002)
(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .) When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran . Lisp embodied nine new ideas:
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Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
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Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
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On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Optimising Docker Layers for Better Caching with Nix
Nix users value its isolated, repeatable builds and simple sharing of development environments. Nix makes it easy to go back in time and rebuild software from years ago without issue.
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Scaling SQLite to 4M QPS on a Single Server (EC2 vs. Bare Metal)
Discover how Expensify achieved remarkable scaling: 4M QPS on one server! Dive into optimizing SQLite for impressive performance gains.
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How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
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