1861
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,895 posts.
1862
Quote Origin: The Person Who is Clever and Lazy Qualifies for the Highest Leadership Posts
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder? Erich von Manstein? Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord? Douglas MacArthur? Frederick the Great? Apocryphal?
1863
The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
Part 2: "Our Immortality or Our Extinction". When Artificial Intelligence gets superintelligent, it's either going to be a dream or a nightmare for us.
1864
Docker Containers on the Desktop
How to run docker containers on your desktop.
1865
Quantity Always Trumps Quality
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered
1866
1867
Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
1868
Presentational and Container Components
You’ll find your components much easier to reuse and reason about if you divide them into two categories.
1869
There Is No Thread
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
1870
Freedom On The Centralized Web
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
1871
The Internet With A Human Face
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
1872
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
1873
A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme
Yesterday’s post about code syntax color schemes got me thinking about what is perhaps the ultimate color scheme, Windows 3.1’s “Hot Dog Stand”: The truly funny thing about this color scheme is that all the other Windows 3.1 color schemes are surprisingly rational, totally reasonable color
1874
Why Neovim is Better than Vim
I know Vim better than most. Vim was my first real text editor.[1] I used it for years. I helped write the Floobits plugin for Vim. I’ve delved into Vim’s source code to figure out its workings. I e…
1875
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
1876
Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…
1877
From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
1878
Quote Origin: Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times
Question for Quote Investigator : There is a great quote by Plato or Socrates about the misbehavior of children in antiquity that I read in the New York Times. The quote shows that the problems between generations are not just a recent occurrence. Instead, the conflicts between parents and offspring are timeless: 1
1879
Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever
So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and…
1880
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
1881
Radicalizing the Romanceless
[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…
1882
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ
Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of…
1883
Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
1884
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
1885
Choosing properties for property-based testing
Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use
1886
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
1887
Formal Theory of Creativity and Fun and Intrinsic Motivation Explains Science, Art, Music, Humor (Juergen Schmidhuber). Artificial Scientists, Artificial Artists, Developmental Robotics, Curiosity, Attention, Surprise, Novelty, Discovery, Open-Ended Learning, Formal Theory of Beauty, Creating Novel…
Formal Theory of Creativity & Fun & Intrinsic Motivation (1990-2010) by Jürgen Schmidhuber
1888
Elon Musk Series: Introduction
A post about how Elon Musk became the real world Iron Man.
1889
ImperialViolet
Thomas Ptacek laid out a number of arguments against DNSSEC recently (and in a follow up ). We don't fully agree on everything, but it did prompt me to write why, even if you assume DNSSEC, DANE (the standard for speaking about the intersection of TLS and DNSSEC) is not a foregone conclusion in web browsers.
1890
Falling Into The Pit of Success
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen