Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 646 posts.
Screw motivation, what you need is discipline
If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…
Fighting spam with Haskell
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The Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
Machine intelligence, part 1
This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence,...
Argentina on Two Steaks a Day(2006)
The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts…
From kafkatrap to honeytrap
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone , ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
Show HN: Cloud Storage with ZFS send and receive over SSH
rsync.net offers secure cloud storage on an open standards ZFS and SSH platform for offsite backup and disaster recovery
Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
Test iOS and Android Audio Latency with Superpowered Latency Test App
iOS and Android Audio Latency Test App with round-trip audio latency data for Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Xiaomi, LG, HTC, Nexus, Motorola, Sony, etc. devices.
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
Right Is The New Left
[Content warning: some ideas that might make you feel anxious about your political beliefs. Epistemic status: very speculative and not necessarily endorsed. This post is less something I will defen…
Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
GTA V – Graphics Study
The Grand Theft Auto series has come a long way since the first opus came out back in 1997. About 2 years ago, Rockstar released GTA V. The …
No Brainer
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
Please stop calling databases CP or AP
This blog post has been translated into Russian , Japanese , Chinese , and Chinese again . For more detail on problems with CAP, and a proposal for an alternative, please see my paper A Critique of the CAP Theorem .
The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far (2012)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
To ECC or Not to ECC
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a
Pattern: Back ends for front ends
With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …
How To Create an SSH CA to Validate Hosts and Clients with Ubuntu
When dealing with an extensive infrastructure and many team members, managing SSH keys for authentication can become unwieldy. However, SSH can utilize cert…
Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
The rain started in August and by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had damaged the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s
Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…
Understanding Container Reuse in AWS Lambda
Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda AWS Lambda functions execute in a container (sandbox) that isolates them from other functions and provides the resources, such as memory, specified in the function’s configuration. In this article we discuss how Lambda creates and reuses these sandboxes, and the impact of those policies on the…