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What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 904 posts.
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Why numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model”
In this post I present a Git branching strategy for developing and releasing version-based software.
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.
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Lisping at JPL (2002)
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
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CO₂ emissions
How much CO₂ does the world emit? Which countries emit the most?
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SQLite as an Application File Format (2014)
An SQLite database file with a defined schema often makes an excellent application file format. Here are a dozen reasons why this is so:
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccinations
Explore data on COVID-19 vaccinations across the world.
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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How to Corrupt a SQLite Database File
An SQLite database is highly resistant to corruption. If an application crash, or an operating-system crash, or even a power failure occurs in the middle of a transaction, the partially written transaction should be automatically rolled back the next time the database file is accessed. The recovery process is fully…
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The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
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Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions by sector
How much do electricity, transport, and land use contribute to different greenhouse gas emissions?
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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski /…
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Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are memory safety problems
The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems . Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source.
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Expanded extension support in Firefox for Android Nightly
Starting September 30, 2020, you can configure Firefox for Android Nightly to install extensions listed on addons.mozilla.org.
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Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020cited by 42History & Retro Computing details
This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
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GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
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Blogging about Midori (2015)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up
Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.
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Excess mortality from March to December of 2020
Explore data on COVID-19 excess mortality across the world.
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You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
“Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce your diet's carbon footprint. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it comes from?
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Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
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The Tao of Programming (1987)
Note: I copied this from http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html and stripped out all of the IMHO extraneous formatting. ---Alex