1891
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,129 posts.
1892
On calculating Fibonacci numbers in C
A few months ago Evan Miller wrote an essay called The Mathematical Hacker . While an interesting post he does make a mistake when he gives ...
1893
1894
Dwolla Begins PayPal-Style Account Suspensions for Bitcoiners
99Bitcoins is your trusted guide to Bitcoin & crypto, offering easy tutorials, expert insights, and in-depth reviews to help you navigate the crypto world.
1895
Is Unicode Safe?
Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.  — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way there. It's supported widely enough that it's a compatible choice, new projects use it, and it's becoming the…
1896
My self published book made $11,000 before I finished writing it
That is what I earned on my book for software team leaders before it was even finished. This august I finished writing and publishing my first self-published book. Last month I got done adding a print and an audio…
1897
How to build an Anti Aircraft Missile: Bayes’ Theorem and the Kalman Filter
Ever wondered how an Anti Aircraft Missile works? A plane can move at different speeds and altitudes, so how do you know when to fire your missile? Well you need to know two things: where the aircr…
1898
1899
1900
1901
What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy…
1902
1903
1904
Musings about Debian and Python
On a regular basis, I find myself the odd-man-out when it comes to talking about how to work with Python on Debian systems. I’m going to write this and post it so that I might be able to point people at my thoughts without having to write the same email in response to each thread that pops up.
1905
How to Write Safe Verilog: Become a PL Troll
Troll? That's how people write Verilog 1 . At my old company, we had a team of formal methods PhD's who wrote a linter that typechecked our code, based on our naming convention. For our chip (which was small for a CPU), building a model (compiling) took about five minutes, running a single short test took ten to…
1906
1907
Stochastic Superoptimization
An “optimizer” should really be called an “improver”, and a “superoptimizer” should be called an “optimizer” 🙂
1908
Analyzing my DNA
I recently bought 23andme [http://23andme.com], a service which requires you to send off a DNA sample, and in return performs a series of interesting tests concerning your health and ancestry. I bought the test as a birthday present to myself, somewhat because I was interested in the results,
1909
Upside risk
Everyone claims that they understand the power law in angel investing, but very few people practice it. I think this is because it’s hard to conceptualize the difference between a 3x and a 300x...
1910
1911
1912
How Go uses Go to build itself
This post is based on a talk I gave to the Sydney Go users group in mid April 2013 describing the Go build process.
1913
What does it mean for light to be stopped or stored?
Physicist: We’ve gotten a handful of questions since this was published and led to articles like this, this, and, this. In a nutshell, some dudes in Germany (Georg Heinze, Christian Hubrich,…
1914
Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
1915
Why GitHub is not your CV
Two days ago, Ashe Dryden published an article I’ve been desperately wishing someone would write for months: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community . It’s a detailed, well-researched take-down of the seemingly quite popular myth that open-source contributions are a useful way to screen candidates for…
1916
What are the 'real numbers', really?
The short, simple answer used in calculus courses is that a real number is a point on the number line . That's not the whole truth, but it is adequate for the needs of freshman calculus. The freshman calculus course (at most universities nowadays) follows the 17th century style of Newton and Leibniz, emphasizing…
1917
Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
1918
1919
1920