Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or di…
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
I wrote earlier about my dream of developing “single-handedly” on an iPhone. Then, I wrote some more about it . The dream still lives strongly! I am now coding single-handedly in any language on my iPhone SE model 2022. But although i still like pythonista I am now using a combination of three great apps that allow me…
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
This post talks about the many different aspects under the umbrella term OOP
Wasm GC is a wonderful thing that is now available in all major web browsers since slowpoke Safari/WebKit finally shipped it in December. It provides a hierarchy of heap allocated reference types and a set of instructions to operate on them. Wasm GC enables managed memory languages to take advantage of the advanced…
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Bridge the gap between structured logging and errors in Go
(Image of "Four-Armed Chuck" programming a PDP-11 is from my giant write-up of Forth .)
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
The materials for the course on compilers: built incrementally and fully in tagless-final style
I spent the past few weeks packing as many easter eggs as I could into my latest project, and in this blog post, I want to dig into some of the more interesting details! If you’re interested in animations/interactions, you’ll want to check this one out; I share a bunch of my favourite secrets and tricks. 😄
A proof-of-concept using Vamp, Chordino, ImageSharp and ffmpeg to add live guitar chord charts to karaoke videos
Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst explores different hierarchal visualizations by visualizing file system or disk space.
One of my favorite joys is exploring a city late at night on rollerblades. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about 10 years now, first in Boston and then in NYC. Every time day turns to night and back again a city takes a breath. At night people flow out or huddle up in buildings, leaving the streets clear for…
We’ve learned how to define and apply Monte Carlo integration—fundamentally, it’s the only tool we need. In the remaining chapters, we’ll explore ways to reduce variance and successfully sample difficult distributions.
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
Microservices work best as a polytree with clear dependencies and no cycles. Learn how this structure reduces complexity and makes systems easier to scale and maintain.
If DM could form a BH at the center of a planet, wouldn’t that then collapse the planet into that BH, consuming it? Wouldn’t the same apply to stars, extinguishing them?
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, but one crucial protocol is still missing.
Pick the cheapest geocoding API provider for your project. An impartial comparison of pricing for HERE, Google Maps Platform, Azure Maps, OpenCage, TomTom Maps, LocationIQ, and Nominatim.
