The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,239 posts.
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don’t think too hard about it, just
Often, doing a little is better than doing a lot.
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I…
Further adventures in JavaScript
SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber. SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish…
Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…
Today I'd like to share some math connecting ideas from information theory, algebra, and topology. It's all in a new paper I've recently uploaded to the arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09581), which describes a correspondence between Shannon entropy and functions on topological simplices that obey a version of the…
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
Parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (EU country) were on the July 11th. We (a center-right opposition coalition) were running Facebook…
A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: …
This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other…
namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.
EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much interest. Just to be clear, using the constant is a very bad idea in almost every situation I can think of. Even instructions like RCPSS should only be used by people who are convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it (or don’t have any other choice). Subtracting from…
In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn’t go into too much is the limitation of…
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
Are cross-project changes in a single atomic commit the key advantage of monorepos? I do not think so.
NSO Group, the Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer behind the Pegasus spyware—used by authoritarian regimes around the world to spy on dissidents, journalists, human rights workers, and others—was hacked. Or, at least, an enormous trove of documents was leaked to journalists. There’s a lot to read out there…
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
This week a group of global newspapers is running a series of articles detailing abuses of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. If you haven’t seen any of these articles, they’re worth re…
The Clojure Core team recently released a new Clojure library, tools.build , that is a culmination of thought around batteries-included build support for Clojure projects. I won’t go into detail around the history and contents of the library in this post because much of that is found elsewhere, including the…
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read - (At Least Twice)
