Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,844 posts.
Busy Beaver puts another one on the Turing Machine's tape (image from the book The New Turing Omnibus). The busy beaver problem is a fun theoretical computer science problem. Intuitively, the problem is to find the smallest program that outputs as many data as possible and eventually halts. More formally it goes…
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
AIX provides the highest level of performance, security, and reliability of any UNIX operating system.
A couple of years ago a lot of buzz started in the Ruby community about Erlang, a functional programming language developed by Ericsson originally for use in telecommunications systems. I was intrigued by the talk of fault tolerance and concurrency, two of the cornerstones that Erlang was built on…
Web Workers are, undoubtedly, the coolest new feature to arrive in the latest version of web browsers. Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface.
Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.
TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an…
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
I recently found a security flaw in the Google Keyczar crypto library. The impact was that an attacker could forge signatures for data that was “signed” with the SHA-1 HMAC algorithm (t…
Finishing up a whirlwind tour of the US West coast (QCon SF, Erlang Factory Lite LA, and a Cognitive Modeling workshop in Scottsdale), I am now waiting for a delayed BA flight at the Phoenix airport. Although I’ve spent as many days flying as I have on US soil, it’s been a great trip.
