931
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,895 posts.
932
Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics (2011)
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
933
Greece
Greece is a remarkable country full of wonderful people, but along dimensions of development and governance, the place is plainly pretty fucked up. It has been fucked up that way for a long time, for decades at least . This has never been secret. Anyone who has visited Athens knows it has far more in common with…
934
Graphics Analysis of an NES Game's Select Menu
In Star Versus’s two player mode, the first thing players see is a menu to select their ships, handicaps, and arenas. Although straight forward in concept, this menu actually maxes out the NES’s graphics in multiple ways. Specifically, it uses each available palette, requires all 64 sprites, and places 8 sprites onto…
935
How I’d redesign piano sheet music
How I’d redesign piano sheet music UPDATE: five years later, I’ve finally published a follow-up to this popular article. This time, I’m trying to do the same thing, but in a plain text format …
936
Streams: Mail 3.0 concept
Introducing concept of Streams, aiming to fix most of email-as-a-medium flaws
937
938
939
Bitcoin: A flawed currency with a useful application for the Eurozone (2014)
The responses of many to my post on Bitcoin reveal a powerful tendency to underestimate the ill-effects of deflation on a social economy. This tendency to underestimate deflation’s deleterious impact matters beyond debates on Bitcoin per se. For example, in Europe the incapacity of the European Central Bank (ECB) to…
940
React Performance
React is very popular at the moment, and I can see why: its developer ergonomics are very attractive. JSX and vDOM are really nice to work with, and it certainly enables composability. But, being the performance-minded person that I am, I wanted to test the claims that it's default-fast.
941
942
Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
A trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away. It’s just like forming and making a first impression when you meet someone new.
943
The Vector Space of the Polish Parliament in Pictures
In fact, only of the lower house, the Sejm. During its current term, 460 deputies voted 5545 times since the 8th of November 2011. The Sejm website publishes the individual results of the votes as …
944
945
Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…
946
1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999
Divide the number 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 into 1 and express the result as a decimal expansion, and you’ll find the Fibonacci sequence presented in tidy 24-digit strings: (Thanks, David.)
947
Microservice Trade-Offs
The microservices architecture can be useful, but to know if it's suitable in your context you need to understand its costs and benefits.
948
949
950
Calculating the intersection area of 3 or more circles
While attempting to learn Javascript and D3.js a couple months ago, I wrote a little library for displaying area proportional venn diagrams .
951
The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
952
Thoughts on Time-series Databases
Preetam "recently" blogged about catena , a time-series metric store. There was another blog post about benchmarking boltdb by a Fog Creek engineer, also looking to write a time series database. This is something of a pattern in the Go community, which already boasts seriesly , InfluxDB , and prometheus ; there are…
953
The Universal Data Structure
Whether you write compilers, web services or Django admin panels, you probably use hash maps more than all other data structures combined. In fact, you may not remember the last time you used anything else. This is not a coincidence: any conceivable data structure can be implemented with a hash map; therefore, there…
954
Safari is the new IE
Update: This post represents my views before I joined the Microsoft Edge team, and before I got involved with browsers or web standards in general. I leave it…
955
956
Energy
I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of...
957
958
959
Could dark matter not exist?
Is it possible that our problems indicate a flaw in the theory of gravity?
960