Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 526 posts.
Last week I was in Vancouver, to give talks at the University of British Columbia and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. As part of that visit, on Friday af…
Does JavaScript use UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding? Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this question anywhere, I decided to look into it. The answer depends on what you’re referring to: the JavaScript engine, or JavaScript at the language level.
Anyone remember Color cycling from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time,...
January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern among the most…
It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.
Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. There are especial cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement - and these very defects, which each of you knows very…
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just…
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
Browse how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business, plus thought-provoking podcasts and films to inspire your inner entrepreneur.
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
The Digital Imprimatur
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
Thunderbird provides an open-source, cross-platform email alternative for those of us who still use stand-alone email clients (and I am one). It’s trust-worthy, it’s under your control, and it’s built to reflect the Mozilla mission. Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of…
A tour of free monads and their motivating use cases
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
Dwight C. Lundell, M.D. lost medical license in 2008. Since that time he has been promoting books that clash with established scientific knowledge of heart ...
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
