1981
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
1982
1983
Stream VByte: breaking new speed records for integer compression
In many information systems, we work with arrays of integers. For example, maybe you need to keep track of which records in a database contain a given value. This sort of mapping can be expressed as an array of integers. These arrays can end up taking up a large fraction of your memory or disk … Continue reading…
1984
1985
No Man’s Sky One Year Later
It’s been a year since I last played the captivating , frustrating , and ultimately disappointing No Man’s Sky. There have been some large updates since then, and so I thought now would be a good time to come back and see how the game has evolved. These columns are going to run through September, so you’re basically…
1986
Killing the C++ Modules Technical Specification
In my previous post, I mentioned that have serious issues with the current Modules TS as it is written. I have wanted to say more on the subject since my tweets, posts, and general comments are missing quite a bit of context for why I think the implementation is wrong and will be more trouble than it is worth.
1987
The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
1988
Programmers Should Automate More
Last week, I created a small script to aid my workflow which left me wondering why I didn't make it earlier. It adds an option in [Finder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder_\(software\))'s context menu to start a static web server in any folder which makes it easier to preview static websites. Technically, it's…
1989
The Cost Center Trap
In the 1960’s, IT was largely an in-house back-office function focused on process automation and cost reduction. Today, IT plays a significa...
1990
1991
Abacus use can boost math skills
The abacus counting device dates back thousands of years but has, in the past century, been replaced by calculators and computers. But studies show that abacus
1992
Casually removing root files
You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…
1993
1994
Zigfrid – A Passive RFID Fuzzer
Zigfrid is the end result of my RFID tinkering. Since I will most definitely forget most things described here in the (very) near future, I share this for those few who might find it interesting. P…
1995
1996
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to D3.js
The landscape for learning d3 is rich, vast and sometimes perilous. You may be intimidated by the long list of functions in d3’s API…
1997
Writing a lexer in Go with Lexmachine (2016)
This article is about lexmachine , a library I wrote to help you write great lexers in Go. If you are looking to write a golang lexer or a lexer in golang this article is for you.
1998
Go and Simplicity Debt Redux
In my previous post I discussed my concerns the additional complexity adding generics or immutability would bring to a future Go 2.0. As it was an opinion piece, I tried to keep it around 500 words. This post is an exploration of the most important (and possibly overlooked) point of that post.
1999
A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers
There are a bunch of things about this story that just don’t make a lot of sense to me.
2000
ICANN has taken my site hostage
This is an short story on how ICANN acts like mafia and has taken my site Nomad List hostage for 2 days now. Here’s how my site used to look: Here’s how it has…
2001
2002
Fake Physics
2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks)…
2003
I'm giving up on HPKP
HTTP Public Key Pinning is a very powerful standard that allows a host to instruct a browser to only accept certain public keys when communicating with it for a given period of time. Whilst HPKP can offer a lot of protection, it can also cause a lot of harm too.
2004
2005
2006
Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
2007
Thrill – Big Data Processing with C++
Yesterday, I discovered an experimental Big Data processing framework written in C++ called Thrill. As most of you surely know, the well-known frameworks of this kind are mostly based on JVM, like …
2008
The Amazing Power of Word Vectors (2016)
For today’s post, I’ve drawn material not just from one paper, but from five! The subject matter is ‘word2vec’ – the work of Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vect…
2009
Where in Europe is electric car a good idea?
<p>Politicians and car manufacturers praise electric cars as a solution to fight climate change, but the life cycle analysis of the whole vehicle shows that electric cars also cause pollution,
2010