2401
What’s a fire, and why does it burn?
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up
Update: Precision 7520 and 7720 available as of March 28; Dell Precision 5720, a 27” All-in-One available as of April 18. Today I am excited to announce the next generation of our Ubuntu-based Pre…
2404
Graph Isomorphism update: quasipolynomial claim restored
On January 4 I announced that Harald Helfgott pointed out an error in the analysis of my Graph Isomorphism test. The error invalidated my previous claim of quasipolynomial efficiency. The text of the announcement is appended below.
2405
Go and Dogma
[ Cross-posting from last year’s Go contributors AMA on Reddit, because it’s still important to remember. ]
2406
Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt
Based on this tweet by Enrico Bertini: Little project I developed during the break looking back at 2016: "Quantifying and Visualizing “Deep Work”" https://t.co/s3d9Zn685Q— Enrico Bertini (@FILWD) January 3, 2017 … after having been successfully primed by this one some weeks ago (because locals!): I also recommend…
2407
20 years as a Debian maintainer
fte (0.44-1) unstable; urgency=low * initial Release. -- Riku Voipio Wed, 25 Dec 1996 20:41:34 +0200 Welp I seem to have spent holi...
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Add a const here, delete a const there
Update, February 2019: Two years later the VC++ bug I reported here still exists, even in VS 2019 preview. However Chromium no longer builds with VC++ so I’m reverting the changes where I del…
2410
Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
The differences between system administrators and software developers as well as why all software developers should have some amount of sysadmin experience.
2411
Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
2412
Deep Text Correcter
Alex Paino's Personal Site and Blog
2413
LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
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Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
2417
Inside the 74181 ALU chip
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
2418
Why I Spent $100k to Fight a $10k Small Claims Lawsuit
What follows is my personal perspective on an interesting dispute. Obviously, it is only my opinion of the situation and there are two sides to every story. I invite the other side to respond if they wish in the comments. I also made the decision to keep the other side anonymous after I first wrote
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An obscure research project could accelerate innovation in language design
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
2423
The science of Westworld
How close are we to building the hosts?
2424
Please don’t pay to use a pay toilet
Pay toilets are nasty, and ought to be illegal. Those of us who are not poor can afford the price, if we accept the practice; poor people can't. To deny people access to a toilet when they need one is nasty and degrading.
2425
Reasons not to use Skype (2012)
As of August, 2025, Skype no longer exists as a dis-service for actual use. However, this information about how it was unjust while it operated may still be interesting for comparison with other online dis-services and for understanding the wrongs that they often do to users.
2426
Visiting a site that uses Disqus when not logged in sends URL to Facebook
I was surprised to see the Facebook SDK being loaded in the network tab on my blog when I don't have any Facebook buttons. It turned out to be coming courtesy of Disqus. No wonder Facebook knows everywhere you go!
2427
Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
2428
Research papers in the .NET source
This post is completely inspired by (or ‘copied from’ depending on your point of view) a recent post titled JAVA PAPERS (also see the HackerNews discussion). However, instead of looking at Java and the JVM, I’ll be looking at references to research papers in the .NET language, runtime and compiler source code.
2429
Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2430
A Tourist’s Guide to the LLVM Source Code
Hi, would you allow me to translate your article to French, preferably under a free lincense like CC-by-sa?