Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
An analysis of modern messaging, and the evolutionary next steps.
The transformation from phony "objectivity" to open one-party orthodoxy hasn't been an improvement
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
API versioning is a really difficult topic, and sometimes seen as a merely religious debate. It’s done differently at different companies, and different teams within different companies often vary. Some folks move from approach A to approach B, and when approach B solves their specific issues they act like
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
A post about lockstep, rollback, and what it takes to prepare your game for future netcode integration. Continue reading →
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
papad Hard to believe Sanjeev Arora and his coauthors consider it “a basic tool [that should be] taught to all algorithms students together with divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and random sampling.” Christos Papadimitriou calls it “so hard to believe that it has been discovered five times and forgotten.” It…
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
Jack MacDonald was a frugal attorney who wanted to build a big net worth to give it to charity thanks to his hobby of investing in the stock market.
My daughter Sterling was denied Medicaid, despite having special needs and being medically complex. Here's what I said to the State of Indiana after denying Sterling's Medicaid application.
Cyclic dependencies: Part 1
Restaurant prices in the 19th century (followed by 20th, below) Note: Until the mid-19th century prices were often quoted in shillings and pence, or in Spanish dollars. One Spanish bit = 12½¢; One …
Last year I discovered, much to my chagrin, that always-on internet socializing was costly for me. This was inconvenient both because I’d spent rather a lot of time singing the praises of social me…
Almost exactly one year ago I quit my job to create a Haskell startup as a solo developer. I had about 20 ideas, but eventually settled on the idea of dependency project health tracking with Deadpendency.
The Mediocre Programmer is a book about the journey of becoming a better programmer. But before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers. Mediocre doesn't mean a bad programmer --- far from it. It means lacking skill. As beginners we start our journey full of fresh ideas of…
Learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you'll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment…
Yes, hiding HTTP-referers on your outgoing links are still a thing. Even though standards evolved, they rely on your user having a current browser, which is really something outside of your control. Even then, many larger websites have technologies in place to mask the http-referer on outgoing links. This is to avoid…
Read about the Irish teenager who won the Google Science award for the magnetic liquid trap that could clean an ocean of microplastics.
The capabilities of game-playing AIs have grown rapidly over the last few years. This trend has culminated in the defeat of top human players in the complex real-time strategy (RTS) games of DoTA 2…
Sedano et al (2017)[1] on "Software Development Waste" identified and describe that software projects manifest nine possible types of waste, in terms of loss of productivity and unnecessary friction.
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and he has a wild experience to share. Apple has a unique culture, and David will give us an insider view of what it was like for him at Apple during the 2000s, roughly between 2001 to 2015 when Apple transformed into the powerhouse that it is today. David worked as a…
In April, I wrote operatornotify.py , a module which allows my programs to notify me of important information or errors. I was immediately very proud of it. It felt awesome to get so much impact out of a sub-100 line module as I went around hooking it up to my existing programs and getting the tracebacks from my…
