The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
Whenever I advise (or join!) a startup, one of the first conversations goes something like this: "Oh man. Everything here is broken! It sucks! There's so much to do and not enough people to do it. We're missing so many things, we don't know where to start! The product needs so much work. Marketing needs
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
Have you (or your company) tried repeatedly to hire for Role X?
I am very happy to say that I have recently received a generous grant from the Astera Institute to set up a small group to work on automatic theorem proving, in the first instance for about three y…
Once you head away from the areas that are serviced by modern terrestrial cable infrastructure, the available digital communications options are somewhat limited. Some remote areas are served using High Frequency radio systems, using radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere to provide a long distance, but limited…
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
Thank you to Ondřej Čertík, Oscar Benjamin, Travis Oliphant, and Pamela Chestek for reviewing this blog post. Any errors in the post are my own. On April 19, 2022, for approximately 11.5 hours, the do
Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.
Open feeds, OPML, books, blogs and graphs
Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022
Software developer based in Montréal, Canada
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them…
From jQuery widgets to the first frameworks, component-centric view layers like React, and today's full-stack frameworks: a look back at each era of JavaScript development and what it taught us.
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
Optimism requires believing in an unknown, unproven future
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
I have an old project on Github called rf-car for controlling a radio car with HackRF. A few months ago, my daughter received a new RC car made by Dickie Toys :
Outside of a very few specialized fields high-security locks are almost totally unknown. Even in the field of locksmithing where high-security locks are known, they are often misunderstood. Today I am going to offer you a primer on the fascinating world of high-security mechanical locks, the securit
In my last post I introduced an Emacs Lisp VM I was writing in Rust. My stated goal at the time was to complete a garbage collector. I think Rust has some really interesting properties that will make building garbage collectors easier and safer. Many of the techniques used in my GC are not original and have been…
Professional niches have – time immemorial – built their own special dialects and languages, sometimes using this as an…
I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost. Resize the system…
Unless Maybe You are Adele
A set of useful tools for cultivating a culture of writing, namely the RFC, the Decision Record and Decision Log, and the Pre-mortem/Prospective and Post-mortem/Retrospective
