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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
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How to take 7 years to ship a beta
Update (February, 2020): I finally shipped v1.0! Since this post I refactored the engine to support lower-end hardware, finished the macOS…
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Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
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Wing Commander II
If there was ever any doubt inside Origin Systems that Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander was destined to join Ultima as the company’s second great franchise, it was banished the moment the first game in the new series was released on September 26, 1990, and promptly sold by some accounts 100,000 copies in its first month…
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
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Utility poles
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Country Time Lemonade Will Pay Legal Fees for Unlicensed Lemonade Stands
Are you thinking of helping your kid setting up a lemonade stand this summer? Apparently, some young entrepreneurs are getting shut down due to a lack of small business permits. In a very savvy PR move, Country Time Lemonade has offered to reimburse any permit fees or fines (up to $300) that are incurred while…
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Freeing the Web from the Browser
The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for. Instead, hyperlinks allow users to associatively explore rich interconnected structures of information with ease. In just a…
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Tearing apart printf()
How does printf work behind the scenes
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Opus 1.3 Released
Ever since version 1.1, Opus has been able to automatically detect whether its input is speech or music, and choose the optimal encoding mode accordingly. The original speech/music detector was based on a simple (non-recurrent) neural network, followed by an HMM-based layer to combine the neural network results over…
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My struggle to learn React
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement
Typical Age DE forum post: The pathfinding in the game is terrible. First off, Age of Empires Definitive Edition is a remaster of...
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Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?
Epistemic Status: Resident Expert I’m a little late on this, which was an old promise to Robin Hanson (not that he asked for it). I was motivated to deal with this again by the launch of Augu…
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The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”
There are currently a number of attempts to deploy a cryptocurrency-based decentralized storage network, including MaidSafe, FileCoin, Sia a...
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Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences , and the…
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Taking Go modules for a spin
Update: Since this post was written, Go 1.11beta2 has been released. I’ve updated the setup section to reflect this. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the reasoning behind storing the Go module cache in $GOPATH . I’ve included his response inline.
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Redux – Not Dead Yet
Some clarification on what's going on with Redux
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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
Over the course of my career as a developer I’ve been involved in a bad management situation more than once.
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GoAWK: an AWK interpreter written in Go
How I wrote GoAWK, how I tested it, and how I measured and improved its performance.
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The Second Edition of “Refactoring”
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
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Anna: A Fast, Scalable, Flexibly Consistent Key-Value Store
There’s fast and there’s fast. This post is about Anna*, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that’s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unpr…