The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
To keep below two degrees, we'll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
When asked about the virtues of Haskell’s strong type system, most people will say the best part is that it lets you refactor with a zen-like tranquility, or that it stops your program from crashing at runtime. I mean, those are both great. But my favorite part is that having a strong type system means I don’t need to…
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?
A few notes on SwiftUI and why UI frameworks should not try to be “smart”
Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think" prefigured the invention of hypertext and the Internet. He imagined a "memex", a desk equipped with a microfilm apparatus, "in which an individual...
The story behind the talk I gave at Vietnam Web Summit 2018
Welcome, This is the index page for my "Reverse engineering the rendering of The Witcher 3" small series where I select some rendering tec...
Andreessen-Horowitz has always been the most levelheaded of the major current year VC firms. While other firms were levering up on “cleantech” and nonsensical biotech startups that viol…
We live in interesting times. For instance, we are witnessing several extinction events all at once. One of them is the massive extinction of species. The other is the extinction of jobs. Both are …
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
Sketches of an interactive arithmetic for programming by Glen Chiacchieri.
(contains amazon affiliate links) I have had repetitive stress injury (RSI) flareups on and off for many years. I’ve kept them under control mostly through use of a Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard that I’ve had for fifteen years. However, several months ago, I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and…
Saagar Jha's website.
For over six years now, I've been studying mathematics on my own in my spare time - working my way through books, exercises, and online courses. In this post I'll share what books and resources I've worked through and recommend and also tips for anyone who wants to go on a similar adventure.
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…
Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do
Many (maybe most) of us Software Engineers are deeply involved in projects where UI and UX are very important concerns (or at least they should be). Throughout the short history of our profession, we
Or: How To Increase Your Elixir/Postgres Performance 20x With One Weird Trick
Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) the usual rules of conditional probability fail in the quantum realm, (2) flat or weak priors lead to terrible inferences about things we care about…
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
