Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 637 posts.
The Animated Guide to Emacs Paredit
Dan's blog
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently , I'm not alone .
Programming with Nothing (2011)
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
Why Amazon Has No Profits
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
Hours of Work in U.S. History
In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek’s length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the…
Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase “Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industy” in late 2004. It’s a scary analogy, but an apt one. I’ve seen developers struggle for years with the
Generating code
How to use go generate.
The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
Microsoft killed my Pappy
I was talking to a young ( The ones I find the most interesting are the ...
Unyielding
Be as the reed, not the oak tree. Green threads are just threads.
iPad charger teardown: inside Apple's charger and a risky phony
This article is now available in Turkish iPad şarjının iç yapısı and Chinese [中文翻译版本] Apple iPad原装充电器拆解 . Apple sells their iPad charger...
Raycasting
deltaDistX = sqrt(1 + (rayDirY * rayDirY) / (rayDirX * rayDirX)) deltaDistY = sqrt(1 + (rayDirX * rayDirX) / (rayDirY * rayDirY))
Hacker News API
Today we’re excited to launch an official Hacker News API [https://github.com/HackerNews/API]. [https://github.com/HackerNews/API] We’ve partnered up with Firebase [http://firebase.com] (YC S11) so that the data we’re making available will be near real time, which should be a huge improvement for developers who had to…
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day
This article is now available in Japanese: 紙と鉛筆でビットコインをマイニング:1日に0.67ハッシュ and Russian: Майним Bitcoin с помощью бумаги и ручки . I decided...
Code is not Literature
I have started code reading groups at the last two companies I’ve worked at, Etsy and Twitter, and some folks have asked for my advice about code reading and running code reading groups. Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I…
Cdb: a fast, reliable, simple package for creating, reading constant databases
Packages that need to read cdb files should incorporate the necessary portions of the cdb library rather than relying on an external cdb library.
You Don't Want XTS
XTS is the de-facto standard disk encryption mode, which makes it look like a good general-purpose one. It isn't. What disk encryption actually promises, and why XTS's guarantees don't travel.
The Magpie Developer
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
Domain Driven Design
Slides and video from my talk "Domain Modeling Made Functional with the F# Type System"
Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression
Some of my friends have depression and have asked me for some suggestions. These will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may r…
Stock Series
If you are wondering whether to dive in, give a couple posts a quick read. You’ll capture the blog’s essence. If after reading those The Stock Series is appealing, you will very likely enjoy it all. If by the same token your reaction is, “This doesn’t feel right for me,” it very likely isn’t. Stock Series…
Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage
[Update: Wladimir Palant has posted a response on the AdBlock Plus blog. Also, a Chrome developer using the handle “Klathmon” has posted numerous good comments in the Reddit discussion of this post , explaining why ad-blockers are inherently CPU- and memory-intensive, and why integrating ad-blocking into a browser…