Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,240 posts.
Sometimes we have ideas that are bad but demand to enter reality. A few months ago, while chatting with a friend, we toyed around with the idea of a language where the only control flow you get is error handling. This idea embedded itself in my brain and wouldn't let me go, so I kept just talking about it until two…
Maybe I just haven't been paying attention before, but in the last year or so, there seems to have been an increase in discussion around the Nix package manager. This is also what got me to finally try it, and I'm very happy with the results, even if the road is a little bumpy.
Sketches of Elixir : Friends, I am now at least in this respect a rare breed: an Elixir programmer who has never written Ruby. I was never a professional Erlang programmer. I cut my teeth on Python
How to print my voice? How to put music on paper? How to print an executable program? All this boils down to storing digital data on paper. This is also called paper data storage . Arrived in this domain from poetry, I’ve been investigating the area for some time. Here is what I found.
Last night, we had a screening of CITIZENFOUR at the IETF meeting in Prague, and about 170 people showed up to see the movie about Edward Snowden’s relevations — information that led the IETF to declare such pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet itself.
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more g...
In this post I'll talk about a small game I've been developing in about 24 hours in total (mostly in a few hour blocks during evenings or…
Introduction When modeling a Postgres database, you probably don’t give much thought to the order of columns in your tables. After all, it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t affect storage or performance. But what if I told you that simply reordering your columns could reduce the size of your tables and…
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
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A lot of new cryptography is landing in Go 1.20, including the new crypto/ecdh package and math/big-less RSA and ECDSA backends!
Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping…
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
Two universal facts about user documentation: Documentation is really important. We are really bad at writing it. We don’t have good theories on what makes for useful documentation. That is except for the four document model, or Diátaxis.1 I’m glad that people use it. I’m also a little frustrated that people use it…
A story about how I learned a lot of things the hard way
The Case for Bayesian Deep Learning Andrew Gordon Wilson Abstract Bayesian inference is especially compelling for deep neural networks. The key distinguishing property of a Bayesian approach is margin
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
Blue Scuti made history, breaking NES Tetris in a way that was previously only theoretical. Here is a glimpse into the what, who, and how.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] New York City is unlike any other city in the United States. It’s the most densely populated area in the country by far, absolutely packed with buildings, business, homes, and people. But for all that you can see walking the str
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
