Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 716 posts.
July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional…
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1
In addition to the end-to-end encryption that protects every Signal message, the Signal service is designed to minimize the data that is retained about Signal users. By design, it does not store a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, ...
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined. Billions and billions of copies of SQLite exist in the wild. SQLite is found in:
I looked into Python because I was considering translating the Lisp code for the Russell & Norvig AI textbook into Java. Some instructors and students wanted Java because
This is a proposal for creating a way to assign to variables within an expression using the notation NAME := expr.
A technical talk about the structure and details of the new, low-latency Go garbage collector.
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1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations: - Amazon ( USA , France , UK , and many more). - Google Books ( here with no…
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a…
A list of things that were not supposed to be Turing-complete, but are.
Last August, I launched a little feature within Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) I called Pwned Passwords [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-million-freely-downloadable-pwned-passwords/]. This was a list of 320 million passwords from a range of different data breaches which organisations…
Introduction to modern Prolog
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
