Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 758 posts.
April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb . Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the…
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.
Build your software factory on Warp: factories as code, any model or harness, with evals, benchmarks, and self-improvement built in.
Guide on using remote attestation in a way that's compatible with GrapheneOS.
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.
This article is part of a 3-part series on trimodal compensation: * Part 1: The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021, this article) * Part 2: The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (2024, this article) * Part 3: The trimodal nature of tech compensation in
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022509 points587 commentscited by 33History & Retro Computing details
This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” To answer that,…
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
Go is an open-source programming language that focuses on simplicity, reliability, and efficiency, specifically designed to make it easy to build software at scale. Although it borrows ideas from existing languages, it has unusual properties that make effective Go programs different in character from programs written…
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
This post explains why Rust made sense for Discord to reimplement: how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements.
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep For more than a decade, memory safety vulnerabilities have consistently represented more than 65% of vulnerab...
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
Follow the Johns Hopkins Medicine newsroom for the latest updates in medicine, scientific discovery, and next generation medical education, expert sources, and media contact information.
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
