Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,204 posts.
The X account of a Turkish opposition leader with 9.7M followers is restricted in Turkey. Although his new account is not restricted, many users say they don't see his posts on their homepages.
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed. What matters is ho
The ongoing breach affecting thousands of organizations that relied on backdoored products by network software firm SolarWinds may have jeopardized the privacy of countless sealed court documents on file with the U.S. federal court system, according to a memo released Wednesday by the Administrative Office (AO) of the…
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
At the time of writing this, the coronavirus has been in our country for a year, which means I have been sitting at home for a very long time. At the start of the pandemic, I had a few pet projects in Rust under my belt and I noticed that the “are we DataFrame yet” , wasn’t anywhere near my satisfaction. So I wondered…
Some of the latest Intel processors support the AVX-512 family of vector instructions. These instructions operate on blocks of 512 bits (or 64 bytes). The benefit of such wide instructions is that even without increasing the processor clock speed, systems can still process a lot more data. Most code today operators…
The 'how' and 'why' of CORS, from start to finish.
Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive…
In the distant past I was super into removing DRM from books and magazines (check out my posts on that topic: Removing Edge Magazine DRM , Removing Zinio DRM ). This interest eventually faded away, mostly because I just stopped using websites that wouldn’t allow me to download and own the products I paid for (kudos to…
A step by step guide for solving a difficult organizational problem, including notes on single stack ranks, team interdependencies, building consensus, reducing work in progress, and how to move your company towards better priority management.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
In this day and age, celebrities have a lot of influence over our politics. Garthwaite and Moore estimated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 netted him an extra 1 milli…
A common question I get at work is “how do I learn to build big distributed systems?”. I’ve written replies to that many times. Here’s my latest attempt.
First off, I'm not finished with this blog post. Don't take it too seriously. This is not about any one company . Some aren't even from me....
Certainly the industry is transforming, however, the people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.
If you got shuned by the society not because of what you did but what your neighbor did, you will cry bloody injustice. This is exactly what is happening in SPAM blacklisting.
Ever heard ‘No, it’s less effort than that!’? Learn why challenging Agile estimates can lead to bad planning and how to handle estimate pushback effectively.
HEY NEWS-YCOMBINATOR , I think you're looking for my articles explaining electricity. This is the 1989 page of raw unedited notes NOT A FRIGGIN' ARTICLE!!! You're all critiquing a wad of crap written on napkins, while not actually reading any of the finished articles. WHY?! Perhaps try these instead: ...
Musings on Hofstadter’s phenomenal book about computation, consciousness, and epistemology.
In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great…
A developer's guide to downloading and running LLMs on macOS, for experimentation and privacy.
Traefik got really popular over the last few years in the bubble of home-lab youtubers , that’s when I first heard about it.
