Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
[orig published in 2019; re-published & updated in 2023 & 2025] The outdoor patio was filled with dude ranchers. It was their yearly conference at Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson, and I was there as a vendor (and first-time attendee). I remember saguaro cactus lining the landscape. It was early evening, the sun was…
J 1 is a concise, interpreted array programming language which looks infamously like line noise. It is the successor to APL , which is a concise, interpreted array programming language which looks infamously like hieroglyphics.
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins:
By Michael Nielsen, November 21, 2019
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.
[latexpage] On Thursday, OpenAI announced that they had trained a language model. They used a large training dataset and showed that the resulting model was useful for downstream tasks where training data is scarce. They
Removing spaces from a string is a common task in text processing. Instead of removing single character we often want to remove all the white space characters or the punctuation characters etc.
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
Ryan MacInnes is a web developer, programmer, and designer in Los Angeles, CA. He loves working on Ruby on Rails projects, Javascript and iOS. His forte is large, scalable and highly interactive web applications with a beautiful minimal approach to UI and UX.
How to make an access-limiting proxy for any API
I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it’s one of the reasons git has been fairly successful… I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important…
It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but I've seen a recent influx in outright scams. Let me step you through a couple of examples. A typical click-bait headline…
Vim 8.1 was released in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termdebug, which provid…
Shaping When laying out text using a font file, the code points in the string are mapped one-to-one to glyphs inside the file. A glyph...
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com: Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. T…
Developer and writer.
Moderating is about dealing with people problems and some people problems are extremely difficult to deal with. The internet is probably th...
Microsoft today is taking the unusual step of releasing security updates for unsupported but still widely-used Windows operating systems like XP and Windows 2003 , citing the discovery of a “wormable” flaw that the company says could be used to fuel a fast-moving malware threat like the WannaCry ransomware attacks of…
Experiments in outdoor computing, deck desking, and reclined computing.
Some years ago someone asked whether it would make sense to switch Python to a PEG parser. (Or a PEG grammar; I don’t recall exactly what…
