Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
Software engineer and writer focused on developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and the intersection of technology and human behavior.
Did you know Clarus the Dogcow is hiding in the macOS Ventura beta?
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
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…
Here's how to download all of Wikipedia (6M+ articles) onto a USB flash drive for offline access. After hours of trying and failing, here's what worked for me
Nov 27, 2023: Much has changed since this article was published. I've become far more involved with ZC development; the name of the program is now ZQuest Classic; our website is zquestclassic.com ; and the web version discussed in this article is now hosted at web.zquestclassic.com
The Making of RP2040 Doom
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
A summary of the best ideas from Atomic Habits by James Clear
More about this in the article I wrote to accompany my talk at EuroBSDCon 2024 . Please note: This article was (unexpectedly) quite popular and many...
Edit: Oh! Hello, there, HN . For context, we're talking about elementary school here. More importantly, I'm not arguing that students should get quick answers from encyclopedias instead of reading books and other primary sources. I'm arguing that Wikipedia is better than "a Google search," which is a position I will…
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
My name is Robert Wardhaugh and I am the Dungeon Master (DM). I am currently Professor of History at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. The Game is mainly played from my basement set up…
TL;DR: After noticing an annoying warning, I went on an absurd yak shave, and discovered that because of a tiny handful of Python packages b...
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
Why some systems -- as a consequence of their intrinsic dynamics -- require a control action that first pushes them the wrong way and makes things worse before it gets better.
I bought two computers this year: a beefy Macbook Pro with M1 Pro and a GPD Micro PC.
Bored of algorithms? Here are my recommendations that are exciting, understandable, and sometimes even useful!
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
The title of this post is a quote from Edward O. Wilson’s book ‘Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge’. For example, if you search for scientific papers about “Entropy” …
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage.
Dmitry.GR: My business card runs Linux (and Ultrix), yours can too. Details, kits, etc...
I need to hit the emergency break.
