Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma…
People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust's syntax, they actually object to Rust's semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I'll try to disentangle the two.
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
The original NMOS version of the MOS 6502, used in computers like the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is well-known for its illegal opcodes: Out of 256 possible opcodes, 151 are defined by the architecture, but many of the remaining 105 undefined opcodes do…
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
The Ultimate OpenBSD Router
You learned about Docker . It's awesome and you're excited. You go and create a Dockerfile:
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
The first rule of PAKE is: nobody ever wants to talk about PAKE. The second rule of PAKE is that this is a shame, because PAKE — which stands for Password Authenticated Key Exchange — is actually o…
Mozilla has discovered that a Certificate Authority (CA) called WoSign has had a number of technical and management failures. Most seriously, we discovered they were backdating SSL certificates in order ...
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.
It is impossible to measure the effectiveness of tools and techniques in software development because we have no way of measuring our output, and thus our productivity.
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…
This is a sketch of proposed enhancements to the Java Virtual Machine instruction set, and secondarily to the Java Language, to support small immutable, identityless value types . (They may also be considered as identityless aggregates, user-defined primitives, immutable records, or restricted classes.) This is an…
Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…
A Chess-GPT Linear Emergent World Representation
This summer, I am again working on Rust full-time, and again I will work (amongst other things) on a “memory model” for Rust/MIR. However, before I can talk about the ideas I have for this ...
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…
An overview of the colormaps recommended to replace 'jet' as default.
