My name is Linus Åkesson, though some of you may know me as lft . I live in Lund, Sweden.
Visit linusakesson.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2011 – Dec 2025
History & Retro Computing 12Games & Graphics 12Software Engineering 7Hardware & Electronics 3Systems & Performance 1
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
Craft is a demo running on its own minimalistic demo platform. The demo platform is based on an ATmega88 microcontroller.
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it.