Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,981 posts.
Fast and easy Levenshtein distance using a trie (2011)
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
Clojure Distilled
The difficulty in learning Clojure does not stem from its syntax, which happens to be extremely simple, but from having to learn new methods for solving problems. As such, we'll focus on understanding the core concepts and how they can be combined to solve problems the functional way.
Don't use assembly unless you're an expert
…unless you're an expert at assembly, that is. The title of this post was obviously meant to be an attention-grabber, but it is much truer t...
Board Members
Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...
Why CCP is still using Python 2
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To Protect Legitimate Interests, Seattle Should Cap All Forms of Innovation
In a 9-0 decision Monday, the Seattle City Council voted to cap the number of UberX, Sidecar and Lyft drivers on our streets — to protect the legitimate interests of taxi companies and the revenue they create for our city.
Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
Low-level is easy
My previous entry has the amazingly interesting title "Blogging is hard". Gee, what a wuss, says the occasional passer-by. Gotta fix my image, fast. Think, think, think! OK, here's what I'm going to tell you: low-level programming is easy. Compared to higher-level programming, that is. I'm serious.
The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
Why curl defaults to stdout
(Recap: I founded the curl project, I am still the lead developer and maintainer) When asking curl to get a URL it'll send the output to stdout by default. You can of course easily change this behavior with options or just using your shell's redirect feature, but without any option it'll spew it out to … Continue…
My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”
If you haven’t read about it yet, “Eugene Goostman” is a chatbot that’s being heavily promoted by the University of Reading’s Kevin Warwick, for fooling 33% of judges …
The URL shortener situation is out of control
I saw a URL today on Twitter to an article on Slate.com. It was a custom short ...
Building OS X Apps with JavaScript
OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to build native OS X apps using good ol’ JS. This article covers the basics and walks through building an example app.
Startups from 2010: Acquired, Pivoted or Still Going?
Editor's Note: This is one of the longest posts I've made - in length and duration. It's said that one year in the life of a startup is the equivalent of dog years when compared to more established co
This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup
"You want Tikhon and Arianna on your team. They are A++ hustlers that will walk through walls and put in hundreds hours of work on your toughest problem. There are 43 investors in Simple Contacts, Tikhon and Arianna are my first calls."