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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,895 posts.
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Teensy weensy crypto
As the UK's politicians continue to fail to understand what "strong cryptography" or "banning" even mean, I thought I would have a look at how simple strong cryptography can be.
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GitWikXiv: Toward a successor to the academic paper
[Other posts in this series: 2,3,4.] I had the chance to have dinner tonight with Paul Ginsparg of arXiv fame, and he graciously gave me some feedback on a very speculative idea that I’ve been kicking around: augmenting — or even replacing — the current academic article model with collaborative d
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Browser Engines 2015: Commit Rates and Active Developer Counts
I used to work as a developer in the “core” group at Opera that developed thePresto web engine. During this period, I often wondered just how many developers...
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The Perilous World of Machine Learning for Fun and Profit
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Do you really know why you prefer REST over RPC?
A few weeks ago I’ve seen an interesting flock of tweets initiated by this question: This question and the tweets that followed put my brain on quite an animated discussion…
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High Frequency Trading on the Coinbase Exchange
by Andrew Barisser
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Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents
There’s a follow-up to this article, now, which explains the federated wiki angle to this more clearly.. “Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twi…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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If Scheme's numbers were like Scheme
Scheme's numbers are not like the rest of its library. They're older, and they're mostly borrowed from other languages (Maclisp and Common L...
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What Comes After MVC
Rails apps start out quickly and beautifully, but after a year features are a struggle, tests are slow, developers are grinding, and stakeholders are unhappy. “Skinny controllers and fat models” ha...
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Random Forests
It’s very common for machine learning practitioners to have favorite algorithms. It’s a bit irrational, since no algorithm strictly…
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Using strace to figure out how Git push over SSH works
Yesterday I was curious about how git push works over SSH. I’m getting more used to using strace to figure this kind of thing out, so I gave it a shot. If I strace pushing to this site’s repository, this shows up:
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Is it futile to un-Google?
A rant on the obsession with privacy stuff.
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
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Oh, Go Ahead, Overthink FizzBuzz (2008)
I gave the best programming interview answer I may have ever given last Friday. The interviewer hauled out FizzBuzz and asked me to solve it. It took me a minute to stop laughing. FizzBuzz is a brain-dead simple programming problem, used pretty much to tell if a developer has a pulse at all. It is…
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Strange C Syntax
In my attempts to learn the C programming language well enough to write my own C compiler , I've encountered some very interesting examples of C syntax that you generally don't see every day. All of these examples you'll see here will compile without warnings or errors even with very strict compiler flags in gcc and…
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Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
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When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
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Common Lisp as a Scripting Language, 2015 Edition
The first computer I used had about 2KB of RAM. The other day, I compiled a 2KB Common Lisp script into a 16MB executable to get its startup (and total execution) time down from 2s to subjectively instantaneous — and that didn't bother me the least, for my current computer has 8GB of working memory…
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