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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 532 posts.
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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
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Regular expression matching can be simple and fast (2007)
This is a tale of two approaches to regular expression matching. One of them is in widespread use in the standard interpreters for many languages, including Perl. The other is used only in a few places, notably most implementations of awk and grep. The two approaches have wildly different performance characteristics:
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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud
Secure and private AI processing in the cloud poses a formidable new challenge. To support advanced features of Apple Intelligence with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing. Built with custom Apple…
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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
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Coroutines in C (2000)
Structuring a large program is always a difficult job. One of the particular problems that often comes up is this: if you have a piece of code producing data, and another piece of code consuming it, which should be the caller and which should be the callee?
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Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
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The LMAX Architecture (2011)
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
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The man who killed Google Search?
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. If you liked
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Golden Gate Claude
When we amplify the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, Claude's responses focus on the bridge. For a short time, anyone can interact with this model.
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Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
The Waymo Driver autonomously navigates tens of thousands of rider-only miles across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin daily. It can navigate common scenarios, like adhering to a crossing guard directing traffic, as well as more unique interactions like avoiding a swerving vehicle. As the Waymo Driver…
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.
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Piet: Programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (2002)
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
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There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Wh…
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
Disclaimer: This post is a very long collection of thoughts and problems I've had over the years, and also addresses some of the arguments I've been repeatedly told. This post expresses my opinion the has been formed over using Rust for gamedev for many thousands of hours over many years, and multiple finished games…
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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EU Council to Vote on Chat Scanning Proposal on Thursday
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0, stopchatcontrol.fr🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇩🇰 Danish: chatcontrol.dk🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole Table of contents: The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence and the End of Anonymous Communication Take action to stop Chat
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What Manifest V3 means for Brave Shields and the use of extensions in the Brave browser
Brave is committed to maintaining Manifest V2 support, allowing users to keep their favorite extensions functioning beyond the industry-wide deprecation.
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Everything I Know About the XZ Backdoor
Please note: This is being updated in real-time. The intent is to make sense of lots of simultaneous discoveries
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The FAA's Hiring Scandal: A Quick Overview
An Air Traffic Control nightmare
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Rider is now free for non-commercial use
Develop .NET, ASP.NET, MAUI, Blazor, and Azure applications – as well as games with Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot – on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer
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Personal Names Around the World (2011)
How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for the Web?
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups