Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
A year ago today I self-published “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” (PIM). In this short note I want to describe the success it’s had, summarize the complaints of some readers and the praise of others, and outline what’s next. Since publication PIM has sold over 11,000 copies. A rough chart showing the…
(the pictured dish is apparently materials for “Buddha Jumps Over The Wall”, named for its ability to seduce away vegetarians – sadly it uses shark fin so has some ethical issues&…
On April 27, 2019, I gave a talk on how to use OpenBSD to write better software at CarolinaCon 15 in Charlotte.
For many types of applications, at times it is necessary to pause the running of the program until some external condition occurs. You may need to wait until another thread finishes, or maybe until a…
Lists are rather hardware-unfriendly data structure. However, having a closer look at why is that and what can be done to improve this can provide an interesting insight into how high-level algorithms performance is affected by the processor microarchitecture.
Restate Some Basic Concepts and Math in Bayesian Filter
A year ago today, weighing nearly 200 pounds and feeling physically run down, and also feeling somewhat depressed about those facts, I hauled my carcass up on the treadmill we have in our basement …
I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…
Static analysis tools (SAST) are perhaps the most common tool for an AppSec team in the endless effort to move security to the left. They can be integrated into development pipelines in order to of…
Leif Singer, an engineer at Automattic, tells us about interviewing for a remote job at Automattic.
Something embarrassing happened to me the other day. I was playing around with a new server on Digital Ocean and it occurred to me: I had no idea how to manage …
Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.
Amazon.com was showing signs of being a Day Two company, including the alleged manipulation of search. There is reason, though, to be optimistic that the company has gotten back to Day One. Plus, w…
In order to hide your IP address and to try and limit throttling when web scraping, it might be a good idea to use a proxy such as Tor. This post describes how to use Python based web scraping tools and Tor to hide yourself when scraping websites for data. However, it can also be used more broadly when using Python to…
If I was setting up curriculum at a university I’d make an entire semester-long class on The Challenger disaster, and make it required for any remotely STEM-oriented major. Because I think it…
A tiny, strict, impure, curried, dynamically typed (although that may change), partially applied language with rather peculiar syntax.
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
Started on 9th May, 2019 it took almost five months to finish. It again puts the tutorial in a place I am happy with for now, and it will likely stay there for quite some time. Given the priorities and circumstances in my life, I don’t expect to keep working on it for time to come.
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 (2011) alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it.
MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people…
A walkthrough for backing up a Linux server to an external storage provider like Amazon S3 automatically.
Contents A New Idea Desire to Share Affirming Response The Naming The Movement Pressure for Simplification Fear of Stagnation Commoditizing the Excellence Crescendo of Disillusionment Conclusion A
Optimizing compilers are a mainstay of modern software: allowing a programmer to write code in a language that makes sense to them, while transforming it into a form that makes sense for the underlying hardware to run efficiently. The optimizing compiler's job is to figure out what your input program does, and create…
