20941
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,240 posts.
20942
20943
20944
20945
Engineering a Chess Match
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
20946
Kelly Criterion – how to calculate optimal bet sizes
So, you’ve probably heard of the Kelly Criterion in the context of gambling or maybe also in the context of investing. When gamblers talk about the Kelly Criterion they are often referring to the idea of sizing your bets, which is the very intuitive idea that if you bet too much of a percentage of your total wealth…
20947
The pedantic checklist for changing your data model in a web application
Let's say you have a web app with some database. In your database you have an Invoice model, where you store things you are charging your customers.
20948
Design Issues in LLVM IR
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
20949
20950
The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
I went down a rabbit-hole analysing a competitor and discovered a black-hat SEO operation involving tens of thousands of websites.
20951
Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
20952
Web Applications from the Future: A Database in the Browser
If progress follows it's usual strategy, then whatever is difficult and valuable to do today will become easy and normal tomorrow. I imagine we'll discover new abstractions, which will make writing Google Docs as easy as the average web app is today.
20953
Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
I received an official response from Replit and my open-source project will be back up soon; please see the bottom of the blog post for an update. The rest of the content here will remain as a historical artifact.
20954
How to sequence your genome at home
In this post I'll describe how to sequence a human genome at home, something that's only recently become possible.
20955
“AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”
Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the…
20956
Clever vs. Insightful Code
“Don’t write clever code.” Why not? “Because it’s hard to understand.” People who say this think of clever code such as Duff’s Device: Duff's Device send(to, from, count) registershort*to, *from; registercount; { registern =(count +7) /8; switch(count %8) { case0: do{ *to =*from++; case7: *to =*from++; case6: *to…
20957
20958
The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
20959
20960
FreeBSD from a NetBSD developer’s perspective
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
20961
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.
20962
20963
Writing a Technical Book
AndreGarzia.com website
20964
Publish and Perish
Coronavirus gain-of-function research comes from playing the "Science Game"
20965
A first lesson in meta-rationality
A first lesson in meta-rationality, or stage 5 cognition, using Bongard problems as a laboratory.
20966
The case for continuous documentation
John Doe's personal website
20967
The Repeated Deaths of OOP (2015)
Object Oriented Programming died several times already. This time might be the last.
20968
“That Won't Work”
Imagine the scene: Several people are discussing a problem that needs an urgent solution. Everyone is deep in thought, and one person proposes a solution. “We could…” and everyone listens intently. As soon as the person is done talking, or perhaps even before, somebody speaks up. “That won’t work!” he says. The…
20969
Implementing strict three-point perspective
Implementing strict three point perspective is ridiculous. You’ll never need it. Let’s do it anyway.
20970
Password Managers
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the attack surface of popular password managers. I think I’ve spent more time analyzing them than practically anybody else, and I think that qualifies me to have an opinion!