3091
Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
3092
Let's build a simple interpreter for APL, part 2 (2020)
Today is the day! Today is the day we take our APL programs and interpret them, so that something like ÷ 1 2 3 -⍨ 1.1 2.2 3.3 can output 10 5 3.33333333.
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3094
Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
3095
Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Sa…
3096
3097
Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke the mobile browser market
Mobile OSes and their most successful apps have drained browser choice of meaning for more than a decade. This has lead to confusion for users and loss of control over data. Web developers, meanwhile, face higher costs and reduced ability to escape walled gardens. It's time for the charade to end.
3098
Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing (2012)
I wrote two posts on the topic of WebKit font smoothing before, but unfortunately the situation has grown worse since then. In allowing the designer to pick their own font smoothing mode with the -webkit-font-smoothing CSS property, WebKit developers have opened up an opportunity for typographic abuse, namely, the…
3099
A writing tip I learned at Oxford
No, this is not an essay about commas
3100
The Reading Obsession
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett
3101
Native-like Navigation of Web apps
Native-like Navigation for Web apps
3102
A Tour of Safe Tracing GC Designs in Rust
I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, …
3103
Valid Signal privacy issues shrugged off while patches quietly rolled out
kelly kaoudis: application security, hacking, software engineering blog
3104
3105
Two stories about tacit knowledge
To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke
3106
Async Cancellation
Sometimes we start things but decide midway through that we would prefer to rather not be doing them. That process is sometimes referred to as cancellation. Say we accidentally clicked "download" on a large file in the browser. We should have a way to tell the computer to stop downloading it.
3107
3108
64-Bit Linux Return-Oriented Programming
Update : Dongli Zhang reports that newer Linux versions organize the stack differently . The code below will need to be modified accordingly.
3109
3110
Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
3111
Distributing unnotarized Mac apps in a text file
This isn't a late April Fools joke. (My April Fools joke that I got hired by Apple as a Swift Evangelist backfired with a profusion of congratulations.) This blog post is a kind of follow-up to some previous blog posts. Last month I wondered what's the best way to distribute Mac apps without notarization , and I…
3112
3113
Farmers always worked from home
Farmers effectively work from home, and in the past majority of the population was farming. What can they teach us about Work-Life Balance?
3114
Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
Econ gives us an example of when and why this happens.
3115
Decentralised content moderation
With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable online, and how it should be enforced. Let me say up front that I believe that these bans were justified. However, they do raise questions that need to be discussed…
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Rust 1.x seems to not always be backward compatible in practice
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…
3118
How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
A response to a developer weighing Clojure's benefits, explaining the REPL workflow through human-computer interaction and reflecting on individual productivity.
3119
Namedtuple in a Post-Dataclasses World
namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.
3120
A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)
This article is the sequel to A Universal Async Abstraction for C++ , in which I talk about the Executor proposal targeting C++23. Quite a bit happened since then.