Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 2,330 posts.

Any topic
1869

AI Nationalism

For the past 9 months I have been presenting versions of this talk to AI researchers, investors, politicians and policy makers. I felt it was time to share these ideas with a wider audience. Thanks to the Ditchley conference on Machine Learning in 2017 for giving me a fantastic platform to get ear

1871

How to Pay Remote Employees

Running a remote company in the US requires using terrible government websites and filling out onerous paperwork. Tortuga [https://www.tortugabackpacks.com] has seven US-based employees across four states. Four of those employees have moved between states while working for Tortuga. In total, we've registered with…

1878

Java’s Mysterious Interrupt

One of the lesser known parts of Java is InterruptedException. With its vague-sounding name and non-committal Javadoc, few people are able to figure out what they need to do with it. Since I myself didn’t really grok it, I decided to put together a post explaining how interruption works. If you are looking for a more…

1879

How to read an RFC

For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more…

1889

Copying objects in JavaScript

In this article we will look at the various ways an object can be copied in Javascript. We will take a look at both shallow and deep copying. While shallow copying is rather straightforward, deep copying is more tricky. Currently, there is a HTML5 specification for a deep copy algorithm but it is not publically…