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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
3092
Holes in Bayesian Statistics
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…
3093
Vietnam's contact tracing app broadcasting a fixed ID
Prologue Bluezone ( Android , iOS ) is a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app sponsored by the Government of Vietnam and developed by a c...
3094
Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face Jail
Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai need to be indicted.
3095
Typed Lisp, a Primer (2019)
Exploring Lisp's fine-grained type hierarchy.
3096
Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
3097
Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVb: Work Hardening, or Hardly Working?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020107 points23 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, we close out our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, although I ought to note that there will be at least one addendum di…
3098
Emacs Lisp Animations
Emacs , a programmer's text editor with roots in the 1970s, is a great tool for animation. In Fall, 2010 I taught a digital art class at NYU's interdisciplinary Steinhardt art school. Clearly, the thing to do was to teach how to make animations in Emacs by programming it in Lisp.
3099
Shipping Const Generics in 2020
It’s hard to believe that its been more than 3 years since I opened RFC 2000 , which defined the const generics for Rust. At the same time, reading the RFC thread, there’s also been a huge amount of change in this area: for one thing, at the time the RFC was written, const fns weren’t stable, and consts weren’t even…
3100
Selling a Tiny Project
How I sold my tiny online store builder One Item Store, and how I think anyone can sell their tiny projects online.
3101
The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan. And in a video to go along with that post, I detailed the process of drilling out a hole in the top of the official Pi 4 case and installing a 5v fan inside. But that solution wasn't great. The fan was a little loud and annoying, and would stay on…
3102
Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
3103
The JavaScript Black Hole: A playbook for ethical engineering on the web
A playbook for ethical engineering on the web.
3104
Randomized Living
Max Hawkins is nomadic artist and software engineer.
3105
Fintech in Chains
"Fintech can come out of the shadows" is the title that Wall Street Journal editors gave to Brian Brooks and Charles Calomiris' oped last week . I have not in a long time seen a title that more utterly contradicts the content of the essay. For what they advocate is exactly the opposite: Fintech in chains, hemmed in by…
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Rebooting a 15 year-old game written in D – Part 1 Compiling
While exploring D recently, I remembered a game I played while at university 15 years ago. For a long time, I couldn’t remember the name at all, only that it was from a Japanese developer. After some search wrangling, I finally managed to find the name of the game: Torus Trooper!
3108
The Un-American Rule on VC's Legal Fees
Legal Fees: Not a Hill to Die On, But Some Parity Would be Nice
3109
The Code It Yourself Manifesto (2016)
We use software for our everyday needs because we want to get something done. We have goals to achieve and things to do.
3110
An API is a user interface
An API is a user interface for programmers, and is no different from a graphical user interface, command-line user interface, or any other interface a human is expected to work with. Turns out programmers are people – who would have thought?
3111
Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target
If you're about my age and had a similarly dull upbringing, you probably also have memories of playing video games behind a teacher's back whenever class involved going to some sort of "computer lab." Flash games were the thing when I was in elementary school, and when I was in middle school, I'd bring Quake with me…
3112
Chips and Geopolitics
TSMC showed the power of modularization, and now they are core to the U.S. national security strategy.
3113
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
3114
Hacking up a fix for the broken AppleTalk kernel module in Linux 5.1 and newer
I was looking at one of my classic Macs a few weeks ago, and noticed that my Ubuntu 18.04 netatalk server wasn’t showing up in the Chooser anymore. If you’re not familiar with netatalk , it’s an implementation of Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) that runs on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and NetBSD. It allows…
3115
Gravity assist maneuvers in space
Ingenious maneuvers by missions to go over the Sun, chase a comet and sail using the Sun.
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3117
A Checklist for Evaluating New Technology
New technology often comes along with a lot of promises. All the hard things? They’re easy now. All of your troubles? Shh, they’re all better now.
3118
How I made a game played in Notepad
Play games made by Sheepolution
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The algebraic structure of functions, illustrated using React components
Did you know there’s an algebraic structure for functions? That may not surprise you at all. But it surprised me when I first found out about it. I knew we used functions to build algebraic structures. It never occurred to me that functions themselves might have an algebraic structure. The structure is fascinating…