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The Zen of Erlang
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
1832
Go fonts
Announcing the Go font family, by Bigelow & Holmes.
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Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?
by Robin Harris | Friday, April 25, 2014 | Backup , Cloud computing & storage | 24 comments
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How to write a Git commit message (2014)
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
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The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
1838
GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes
Since SpaceFM is entering the GTK3 realm (SpaceFM can now be built on anything from GTK 2.18 “I won’t give up my lenny!” thru GTK 3.6.x), I’m starting to hear more feedback …
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
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The Panic Status Board
This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!
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Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the die rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.
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The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG – suspected NSA backdoor (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3
In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…
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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
1848
JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation
Improve the start-up time of both small and large Java applications, with at most a limited impact on peak performance.
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So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
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Subliminal learning: Models transmit behaviors via hidden signals in data
We study subliminal learning , a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a "teacher" model that prefers owls. This same…
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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
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Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
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Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
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The Inner Ring (1944)
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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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,...
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Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
An emoji flipbook presentation by Alex Komoroske about how dysfunctional organizational dyanmics arise even when individuals are well-behaved