Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,216 posts.
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
There’s been a bit of a media onslaught from David Cameron about his ‘war on porn’ over the weekend. Some of the messages given out have been very welcome – but some are con…
Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule ov…
Turn a misbehaving computer off and on, or stop a misbehaving program and then start it again. Often, the problem goes away.
Recently I approved a pull request from a colleague, that had the following description: “That’s a hacky way of doing this, but I don’t have time today to come up with a better im…
Is it as hard as you think?
If I pay for a website, I expect to not see ads.
I’ve spent the past several years working with functional programming languages in my free time – primarily Haskell and OCaml. I love both languages but also find aspects of each frustrating. Haskell is terse and elegant with type classes providing a powerful mechanism for ad-hoc polymorphism. However, it can also be…
Earlier this year, when I went from having only Facebook-login on Wishy.gift to allow registrations with email address and password, one of my concerns was how to implement this is a way that protects the data and privacy of my users. I don’t have any ads or analytics on the site, the users can select whatever display…
I started using Scala 5 years ago instead of Java after starting (but never quite finishing) to read the first edition of Programming in Scala. First only present in tests, my first attempts at Scala code would quite soon invade small utility classes and before I knew it take over all of my projects. There are many…
It’s WWVB, the station that the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses to broadcast the current time, tuned to the 60 kHz frequency. Day and night, this station diligently continues broadcasting.
White lies of AI from a struggling geometer
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
The rise of AI-powered coding has created an unexpected market: cleaning up the technical debt from prompt-generated software. Here's why 'Vibe Coding cleanup' is becoming a legitimate service category and what it means for the future of software development.
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
Inspired by numerous other such lists of falsehoods. Pretty much every video player in existence gets a good chunk if not the vast majority of these wrong. (Some of these also/mostly apply to users, though)
Here I’ll try to explain the coolest ideas in each of AlphaProof’s IMO 2024 solutions. AlphaProof produces proofs in Lean, and each Lean proof is composed of a series of tactics. So I’ll pick out the tactics that correspond to these ideas in the proofs for problems 1, 2 and 6 (the three problems that AlphaProof…
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…
Magic Leap 2 Presentation Was the Hit of the Conference Kevin Curtis (Curtis), Magic Leap’s VP of Optical Engineering, presentation “Unveiling Magic Leap 2’s Advanced AR Platform and Re…
There are a bunch of reasons to launch an onion site, and a bunch of benefits, all of which have provided value to platforms such as Facebook, the BBC or NYT Onions. The first benefits are authenti…
