Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,890 posts.
The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government…
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?
In this article I examine human- and machine aspects of typing latency (“typing lag”) and present experimental data on latency of popular text / code editors. The article is inspired by my work on implementing “zero-latency typing” in IntelliJ IDEA.
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now.
GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked (/s) to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was re
Precision colors for machines and people
Software to warm up your computer display at night, to match your indoor lighting.
How much CO₂ does the world emit? Which countries emit the most?
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
(This is a modified version of the keynote talk given by Rob Pike at the SPLASH 2012 conference in Tucson, Arizona, on October 25, 2012.)
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
Maintained Compatibility List for International Banking Apps This list includes banking apps that have been tested, submitted, reviewed, and verified as compatible. LIST | SUBMIT | UPDATE | POSSIBLE WORKAROUND SOLUTIONS Introduction Welcome to the crowd-sourced dataset for GrapheneOS users on currently supported…
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
