The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
I play World of Warcraft . Being a Linux user requires me to run this in Wine , a Windows API translation layer. While Wine is continuously improving, its performance in Direct3D games still leaves much to be desired.
Isaac Asimov, in one of the anthologies he edited, mentioned reading some astronomical news back in the early 1960s about neutron stars. Being a science popularizer as well as a science fiction author, he was inspired to write a science essay about neutron stars. This was read by a few people but then more or less…
Why project-based learning fails to build programming skill, and what works instead: break skills into parts and drill them with fast feedback.
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
Last week Apple made an announcement describing changes to the iCloud service for users residing in mainland China. Beginning on February 28th, all users who have specified China as their country/r…
App developers sometimes ask me what they should do when their features, designs, or entire apps are copied by competitors.
What does it mean to add versioning to the go command? The overview post gave a preview, but the followup posts focused mainly on underlying details: the import compatibility rule , minimal version selection , and defining go modules . With those better understood, this post examines the details of how versioning…
As programmers we occasionally find ourselves in “Programmer’s Hell”, where our regular abstractions fail to satisfactory solve certain recurrent problems.
I've been announcing the Open Beta release of my game HexSolve for Android and iOS. HexSolve was written in Smalltalk and people have been ...
Having just written rather a sad piece on my company’s blog, I thought I’d cheer myself up a bit — and explain a few things that have been hugely …
A Career Crossroads In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good ... Read more
Before I start this post, let me preface it by saying that I’m not an experienced Rustacean by any means. The excellent foks at /r/rust gave a lot of helpful feedback and cleared up some misconceptions I had. Futher errata and corrections are appreciated. This post is aimed at helping other fledgling rust-learners…
Earlier this month, I had the exciting opportunity to moderate a discussion between Professors Yann LeCun and Christopher Manning, ti...
Facebook’s (much deserved) media nightmare continued this week when it came under criticism for spamming members who signed up for two-factor authentication. This was followed by charges that its P…
IOTA is a cryptocurrency targeting the internet of things. It purports to be scalable, decentralized, and feeless. Unfortunately it is none of those things.
In 2014, I wrote about how I chose my first job out of college. I’ve learned a lot in the 4 years since then—here’s how I would change my criteria if I were picking a job today.
This content was originally meant to be presented as part of my workshop on Rust and microcontrollers at the NITC FOSSMeet 2018 . As I was not able to cover it satisfactorily during the workshop, I thought of writing it down!
Graph theory represents one of the most important and interesting areas in computer science. But at the same time it’s one of the most…
The official Go proposal is at https://golang.org/issue/24301 , filed on March 20, 2018 and accepted on May 21, 2018.
A versioned Go command must decide which module versions to use in each build. I call this list of modules and versions for use in a given build the build list . For stable development, today’s build list must also be tomorrow’s build list. But then developers must also be allowed to change the build list: to upgrade…
Last August, I launched a little feature within Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) I called Pwned Passwords [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-million-freely-downloadable-pwned-passwords/]. This was a list of 320 million passwords from a range of different data breaches which organisations…
