Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,206 posts.
Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…
One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.
A rant about websites that collect user data before revealing that a sign-up is required to see the results.
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story.
How to answer this question—and how not to
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter . In online discussions about this, I frequently see…
To my great surprise, young people now somewhat frequently contact me in order to solicit career advice.They are usually in college or highschool, and want to know what the best next steps are for a career in security or software development.This is, honestly, a really complicated question, mostl...
Learn how to spot the difference between and expert and an imitator with 5 key tells.
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
A friend of mine pinged me online, said “Hey, remember that thing we were talking about doing a couple years ago? I still have one of the domain names, gonna let it go unless you want it.”
( These are my notes from the first half of my talk at HOPE9 last weekend. I write notes like these not as a script, but so that I have at least some words ready in my head when I'm speaking. They are more conversational and less organised than a usual blog post, so please forgive me the rough edges. )
An interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman about their new partnership, plus my thoughts on OpenAI and Microsoft’s new deal.
Last week I wanted to replace my OpenVPN setup with WireGuard. The basics were well-documented, going beyond the basics was a bit trickier. Let me teach you want I learned. The basics But first, let’s summarize the basics. I have a server with a hosting provider that I want to use as a VPN server. I won’t delve into…
The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused to redirect the Good…
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
if you always wanted to but think it isn't worth telling a speaker you liked their talk, this is your encouragement post to do so.
2.8k words, 13 minutes reading time
In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…
Patrick Weaver’s Website
