Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
Hey kids, did you know that JavaScript doesn't have integers? That's right! All JavaScript numbers (either primitive numbers, or the Number object, and don't even get me started on how stupid it is that there is even a distinction between the two) are actually double floats! Now, in any Lisp-derived language, you…
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…
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …
This PEP provides the technical specification for the match statement. It replaces PEP 622, which is hereby split in three parts:
Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal. Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $69
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?
Essential metrics for a healthy site
When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…
Explore the top programming languages on GitHub—and what languages are growing the fastest.
The talk I gave last year on common crypto flaws still seems to generate comments. The majority of the discussion is by defenders of Javascript crypto. I made JS crypto a very minor part of the tal…
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…
SUVs, which make up an increasingly large share of the vehicle fleet, are more likely to kill pedestrians than cars. Fresh designs haven't changed that.
Snippet: What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the…
This page contains a JavaScript calculator of Hawking radiation and other parameters of a Schwarzschild black hole.
A comparison of Emacs and OS X keyboard shortcuts for editing text.
Solving novel problems and setting a new milestone in competitive programming.
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…
In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
Today we are releasing our latest open-source project: Backblaze Reed-Solomon Java library for erasure coding. Click for details on how to use and download.
Explore long-term changes in deforestation and deforestation rates across the world today.
ZURB is a product design company that helps businesses create better experiences through research-driven design strategy, interaction design, and branding.
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
When we think of nuclear safety, two accidents often come to mind: Chernobyl and Fukushima. What was the death toll and impact of these disasters?
Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass, a recently-announced privacy-preserving protocol developed in collaboration with researchers from Royal Holloway and the University of Waterloo.
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
