2101
Hubble
If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,129 posts.
2102
Comcast caught hijacking web traffic
On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…
2103
Replacing Python: candidates
This post evaluates the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the best language in which …
2104
FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
2105
Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
2106
An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
Bayes’ theorem was the subject of a detailed article. The essay is good, but over 15,000 words long — here’s the condensed version for Bayesian newcomers like…
2107
Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
2108
Quote Origin: Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
2109
Survivorship Bias
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisib…
2110
The Biggest Myths
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
2111
Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
2112
Language Log: Shakespeare used <B><I>they</I></B> with singular antecedents so there
Not happy that I cite Sean Lennon as a source of evidence concerning the way they can be used in modern English? Feeling that only something 400 years older would really convince you that it's OK. Has Coby Lubliner got news for you! Coby writes from Berkeley to point out the following lines from Shakespeare's A Comedy…
2113
Orbital Speed
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?
2114
2115
2116
Quote Origin: Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
2117
Laser Pointer
If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
2118
Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
2119
bliki: Test Pyramid
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
2120
Popularity – Brendan Eich
It seems (according to one guru , but coming from this source, it’s a left-handed compliment) that JavaScript is finally popular .
2121
jQuery file size
Note: The gzipped and Zopflinated file sizes refer to the total byte size of the file after compressing it using gzip or Zopfli with the default settings . For gzip, this boils down to gzip -6 file.js — the default compression level is 6 on a scale from 1 (fastest, but less compression) to 9 (slowest, but best…
2122
The Last Psychiatrist: Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World
This is a brilliant campaign, for technical and artistic reasons. What is the brand that it conveys? Heirloom quality .
2123
A Few Notes on the Culture, by Iain M Banks
Link to: Main page | About Me | Puzzle | Book Reviews | Essays and Short Stories | Babylon 5 | Space School UK | Gallery | Links
2124
Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics . . ]
2125
Typography in ten minutes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
2126
Who By Very Slow Decay
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “…
2127
Hyphens and dashes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
2128
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
The Mortal Passage Trilogy: An Epic in Four Stories is now available. That link leads to Amazon, but you can find it on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and elsewhere too.
2129
DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.