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Benedict’s Newsletter
What mattered in tech this week? A weekly email newsletter.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 822 posts.
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More Dots: Syntactic Loop Fusion in Julia
After a lengthy design process (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/8450) and preliminary foundations in Julia 0.5 (/blog/2016-10-11-julia-0.5-highlights#vectorized_function_calls), Julia 0.6 includes new facilities for writing code in the "vectorized"...
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How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
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Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
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Study: Volkswagen’s excess emissions will lead to 1,200 premature deaths in Europe
A new MIT study finds excess emissions generated by Volkswagen cars sold in Germany, will likely cause 1,200 premature deaths throughout Europe. The most affected countries include Germany, Poland, France, Czech Republic.
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Welcome to Gitea
Gitea is a community fork of the popular self hosted Git service Gogs. We're a growing group of former Gogs users and contributors who found the single maintainer management model of Gogs frustrating and thus decided to make an effort to build a more open and faster development m
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Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
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How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim
You're not alone, jclancy. In the five years since this question was asked, there have been over a million other developers who got stuck in Vim and couldn't escape without a bit of help. Indeed, the difficulty of quitting the Vim editor is a common joke among developers.
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Toward Go 2
How we will all work together toward Go 2.
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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
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Over the Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack
Posted by Gal Beniamini, Project ZeroIt’s a well understood fact that platform security is ...
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How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
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Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report [pdf]
We use data to tell stories of business-related trends we focus on. We hope others take the ideas, build on them & make them better.
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Exactly-once Semantics: How Kafka Does it
Exactly-once is a hard problem to solve, but we've done it. Available now in Apache Kafka 0.11, exactly-once semantics.
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Ways to paginate in Postgres (2016)
Pagination, pervasive as it is in web applications, is easy to implement inefficiently. This post examines different methods of server-side pagination and their tradeoffs in PostgreSQL. Methods explored include limit-offset, cursors, keyset pagination, as well as more exotic techniques.
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Inside Cloud Spanner and the CAP Theorem
Building systems that manage globally distributed data, provide data consistency and are also highly available is really hard. The beauty of the cloud is that someone else can build that for you.
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Epoll is fundamentally broken
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
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Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
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To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
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Why undefined behavior may call a never-called function
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...
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Phishing with Unicode Domains
Vulnerability in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera makes users susceptible to phishing with Unicode domains
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Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
CHAPTER from SKIN IN THE GAME
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Colorized Math Equations
Years ago, while working on an explanation of the Fourier Transform, I found this diagram: Most ideas aren't inherently confusing, but their technical…
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The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
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Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
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Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.