Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 822 posts.
I were going to write an introduction about how important negative results can be. I didn’t. I assume you can figure out for yourself why that is and if not you got all the more reason to read this blog post. If you think it’s trivial why my result is negative, you definitely need to read the blog post.
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…
In 1996, Paul Kocher published a novel attack on RSA, specifically on RSA implementations , that extracted information on the private key by simply measuring the time taken by the private key operation on various inputs. It took a few years for people to accept the idea that such attacks were practical and could be…
Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communication among threads) which is being…
I normally do not read comp.lang.c, but Jim McKie told me that `` Duff's device '' had come up in comp.lang.c again. I have lost the version that was sent to netnews in May 1984, but I have reproduced below the note in which I originally proposed the device. (If anybody has a copy of the netnews version, I would…
Being able to read and write opens up the world of education and knowledge. When and why did more people become literate? How can progress continue?
In the years following World War I, America was gripped by the fear that the Communist Revolution that had taken place in Russia would spread to the United States. As is often the case when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties paid the price. In November 1919 and January 1920, in what notoriously became…
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
Paying taxes in America doesn’t need to be difficult. But it's kept that way by the lobbying efforts of tax prep companies that profit from confusing tax forms.
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Patreon gives creators the tools they need to reliably reach their fans, strengthen their communities, and build sustainable businesses
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…
Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed.
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages.
Update: taking this down for now until some questions about the deterministicbuilds are answered; currently I do not believe the Zcash trusted setup shouldbe...
We’re working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it.
How does your country measure up in the 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index?
This short tutorial will go through the basics that you need to know if you want to use Org as a spreadsheet system.
“The Implementation of Functional Languages” is a book about implementing functional programming languages using lazy graph reduction, and it divides into three parts. The first part describes how to translate a high-level functional language into an intermediate language, called the lambda calculus, incuding detailed…
Clojure is a dynamic development environment where you interact with your program while you write it, growing and adding to it while it’s running. To work with Clojure you need an editor that supports evaluation in source files and structural editing (working with nested forms in addition to character editing).
