Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,820 posts.

Any topic
2021
2317

Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers

Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding. To work with this…

2320

Adam Smith and Inequality (2014)

The assumption that Adam Smith accepted inequality as the necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy is wrong, writes Deborah Boucoyannis. In reality, Smith’s system precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximise the wealth of…