Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,098 posts.
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
When a browser connects to an HTTPS site it receives signed certificates which allow it to verify that it's really connecting to the domain that it should be connecting to. In those certificates are pointers to services, run by the Certificate Authorities (CAs) that issued the certificate, that allow the browser to…
Tour de Babel Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ This is my whirlwind languages tour — the one I was going to write for the Amazon Developers Journal this month, but couldn't find a way to do it that was... presentable. For one thing, I lapse occasionally into coarseness and profanity here, so it
Crypteto has a 49,152-bit symmetric key: The most important issue of any encryption product is the ‘bit key strength’. To date the strongest known algorithm has a 448-bit key. Crypteto now offers a 49,152-bit key. This means that for every extra 1 bit increase that Crypteto has over its competition makes it 100%…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
Another great post
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.
SeekerBlog is a field guide for modern seekers: mindful travel, deep curiosity, science, creativity, slow living and self-discovery. Essays, guides and stories for those who seek more.
How to implement type classes in terms of term-level data structures
While the Common Lisp standard does not require implementations to eliminate tail calls, some do—thereby allowing a more functional programming style. Especially in the prototyping phase, it can be useful to know where this functional style can be employed and where it's likely to cause stack overflow. Since I…
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
This is a big deal: On May 13th, 2008 the Debian project announced that Luciano Bello found an interesting vulnerability in the OpenSSL package they were distributing. The bug in question was caused by the removal of the following line of code from md_rand.c MD_Update(&m,buf,j); [ .. ] MD_Update(&m,buf,j); /* purify…
Last week I was in Vancouver, to give talks at the University of British Columbia and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. As part of that visit, on Friday af…
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
Does JavaScript use UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding? Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this question anywhere, I decided to look into it. The answer depends on what you’re referring to: the JavaScript engine, or JavaScript at the language level.
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
In the world of early retirees, we have a concept that goes by names like “The 4% rule”, or “The 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate”, or simply “The SWR.” As with all thing…
Anyone remember Color cycling from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time,...
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it.
Recently, while idly browsing through the source code of Python, I came upon an interesting comment in the bytecode VM implementation ( Python/ceval.c ) about using the computed gotos extension of GCC [1] . Driven by curiosity, I decided to code a simple example to evaluate the difference between using a computed goto…
The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking. The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challeng…
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
