The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
On the day that I am scheduled to see my friend Chelsea for the first time in six years, I wake up at 4:51pm to a shrieking fire alarm in my hotel room. Semi-conscious and disoriented, I leap out of bed and spin around wildly grabbing at all the things I care about – my phone and passport, the precious slip of paper…
About six months ago, I started my first large-scale Rust-based project. I’d dabbled with the language in its early days, but back then it was a different beast, and not particularly approachable. I decided to try again, and I’m glad I did. Rust is quickly becoming my favorite language for all systems work (which is…
Jerry Brown has proposed legislation that would allow a lot more housing to be built in the Bay Area, and hopefully significantly reduce the cost of housing here. More supply should lead to lower...
Wherein the author discusses the Plan 9 operating system. First of several.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
Killing the web to save it.
I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might...
Reconstructing films with artificial neural networks
I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, a…
( These are notes that I wrote up from a talk that I gave at the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience . You can tell that it was in Washington, DC because of the “cyber”.
It is very fair to say that Apple is threatened by the potential rise of AI. Google, though, is also threatened by its inability to own customers’ attention. The solution for both companies m…
‘A “big data” approach to inflation is helping us understand the fundamental question of why recessions happen’ In the dying days of 2015 came news to set any geek’s pulse racing: the declaration o…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code: #include <stdint.h> int count(uint64_t x) { int v = 0; while(x != 0) { x &= x - 1; v++; } return v; } Can you guess? popcntq %rdi, %rax That is right. A fairly sophisticated C function, … Continue reading The surprising cleverness…
If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you.
Elixir is a fairly young language that was born when José and a few Rails developers tried to create a modern language optimized for concurrent, distributed, lightweight processes They wanted a modern Ruby-like syntax with a well-tested process ma
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
interviewer: Welcome, can I get you coffee or anything? Do you need a break? me: No, I've probably had too much coffee already! interviewer: Great, great. And are you OK with writing code on the...
Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of security through obscurity it does work very well at killing a lot of the automated logins you always see in /var/log/auth.log .
In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…
