Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 1,905 posts.

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1892

Explorable Explanations

An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's…

1893

"Schneier's Law"

Back in 1998, I wrote: Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. In 2004, Cory Doctorow called this Schneier’s law: …what I think of as Schneier’s Law: “any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to…

1894

The protocol-relative URL

Update 2014.12.17: Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns , this technique is now an anti-pattern . If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset.

1895

Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style

We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…

1898

Things that amuse me

I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…

1902

nasal demons

Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…

1905

Top Ten Fasting Myths Debunked

Or “Top Ten Diet Myths Debunked“. That would have fit almost as well. Ok, so in retrospect, I think I screwed up on the title. Many myths just happened to be connected to intermittent fasting (meal frequency, breakfast skipping, etc.). Well, live and learn. November 4th Addendum Section added at the end of the…