The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
1. In the 1970s, the philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay on the nature of human fallibility that I read during my surgical training and haven’t stopped...
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
These are my stupid unix tricks. I hope that they are useful to you. Platform Note I use Mac OS X (pron: “ten”). If you don’t, you might want to switch…
I have suspected for years that the classic buffet line system is a deeply flawed method, so I decide to simulate different methods to find out better ways
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
Google presented a vision of ambient computing that goes beyond the smartphone. The company is well-placed, but faces challenges both in the marketplace and in the mirror.
We used to make land. We built long wharves for docking ships, and then over time filled in the areas between them. Later we built up mudflats wholesale to make even larger areas. Here's a map of Boston showing how much of the land wasn't previously dry: (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map &…
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Over the past year I've been working on a minimal-dependency hobbyist computing stack (everything above the processor) called Mu . The goal is to:
Modern processors are superscalar, meaning that they can execute many instructions at once. For example, some processors can retire four or six instructions per cycle. Furthermore, many of these processors can initiate instructions out-of-order: they can start working on instructions that appear much later in the…
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
There's been a lot of talk about DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH lately, primarily due to Mozilla's and Google's respective plans to move forward with enabling it in their browsers. There's also a lot of misunderstanding and conflation of speculated plans for world domination with practical benefits of the technology; it…
Today’s A To Z term is another proposed by @aajohannas. I couldn’t find a place to fit this in the essay proper. But it’s too good to leave out. The simplex method, discussed with…
I’m excited to announce that OnionShare 2.2 is released! You can download it from onionshare.org. When I first wrote OnionShare in 2014, it let you anonymously and securely send files to people. It worked like this: OnionShare zips up the files, starts a local web server on
In this post we describe and demonstrate a neat trick to exfiltrate sensitive information from your browser using a surprising tool: your smartphone or laptop’s ambient light sensor. In short: 1. We provide background about the light sensor API and current discussions to expose it more broadly to websites.
Reverse-engineering Safeway's coupon APIs to automate adding digital offers to an account.
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot
Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there ...
In 2000, the programmatic browser differences were perplexing, so I made a tool to help manage the problem. I started with something similar to ecomcon (see How JavaScript Works , Chapter 23). I would have special markers in the source that designated sections of code that would only be delivered to particular…
Telegram’s whole scheme was to skin precisely the retail buyers who securities registration is meant to protect from being ripped off.
