Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
June 2024 update: Following engagement with the authors, the decision has been made that changes to the plain language summary and abstract would not impact the scientific integrity of the content and so Cochrane is no longer seeking updates to the plain language summary and abstract of this version of the review…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisib…
There have been almost as many proposals for spelling reform as there are rewrites of Esperanto. (Tellingly, there has been precisely one success in each category-- Noah Webster and Ido-- and neither caught on universally.) Most of these proposals spend their energy fixing what isn't broken . For instance, they search…
Idioms and patterns for handling errors in Go.
This sixteen-rank organ was designed and built for our home by Abbott and Sieker of Los Angeles, California, as their “Opus 67.” It has 812 pipes, separated into three divisions:
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
I know Vim better than most. Vim was my first real text editor.[1] I used it for years. I helped write the Floobits plugin for Vim. I’ve delved into Vim’s source code to figure out its workings. I e…
Building a fully functional, code-editing agent in less than 400 lines.
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
As AI and HPC datasets continue to increase in size, the time spent loading data for a given application begins to place a strain on the total application’s performance. When considering end-to-end…
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
Fledgling physicist Ching-Yu Kuang has discovered a Rosetta Stone for all of physics, a treasure trove of advanced scientific breakthroughs beyond all imagination. Exotic energy, teleportation, FTL, parallel universes and near-infinitely more wonders are just within reach; a pr...
C:\TEMP> md5sum hello.exe cdc47d670159eef60916ca03a9d4a007 C:\TEMP> .\hello.exe Hello, world! (press enter to quit) C:\TEMP>
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
Recent CPUs from Intel requires a binary called the “Management Engine” (Intel ME, or ME for short). This binary is one of three parts required if a business elects to use Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), which Purism avoids. Purism laptops can function with a neutralized and disabled ME, as we have tested…
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
This PEP introduces generator expressions as a high performance, memory efficient generalization of list comprehensions PEP 202 and generators PEP 255.
I liked the idea of Jennifer Dewalt’s 180 websites in 180 days. However, unlike Jennifer who learned web development from scratch, I can already build stuff. M…
See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last couple...
Explore data on COVID-19 testing across the world.
We are introducing GPT‑5, our best AI system yet. GPT‑5 is a significant leap in intelligence over all our previous models, featuring state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, health, visual perception, and more.
KFF is collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity to gain increased insight who is receiving the vaccine and whether some groups are facing disparities in vaccination.
WHO act sheet on the 10 leading causes of death. In 2023, the 10 leading causes of death accounted for 33 million deaths, or 54% of the total 61 million deaths worldwide. The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with two broad topics: cardiovascular (ischaemic heart…
Butterick’s Practical Typography
We’ve trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3 while also making them more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models…
This PEP describes an addition to the standard library called Data Classes. Although they use a very different mechanism, Data Classes can be thought of as “mutable namedtuples with defaults”. Because Data Classes use normal class definition syntax, y...
There are not a lot of very strong empirical results in the field of programming languages . This is probably because there’s a huge amount of variables to control for, and most of the subjects available to researchers are CS undergraduates. However, I have recently found a result replicated across numerous codebases…
Free and Open-Source CalDAV and CardDAV Server
