Visit spinellis.gr → On Hacker News Aug 2009 – Oct 2026
History & Retro Computing 5Life, Learning & Writing 4Tools & Productivity 3Society, Policy & Culture 3Software Engineering 3Systems & Performance 2
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
I was trying to run a simple join query on MariaDB (MySQL) and its performance was horrendous. Here’s how I cut down the query’s run time from over 380 hours to under 12 hours by executing part of it with two simple Unix commands.
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
Twitter users @SadHappyAmazing and @HistoricalPics posted yesterday two photographs (copy) showing the Raspberry Pi Zero juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building, where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957. Here is how the two computers compare.
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.
Although I'm a happy (also paying) user of GitHub's offerings, there are times when I prefer to host a private repository on a server I control. Setting up your own Git server can be useful if you're isolated from the public internet, if you're subject to inflexible regulations, or if you simply want features…
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
Panos Ipeirotis , a colleague at the NYU Stern School of Business , received considerable media attention when, in a blog post he subsequently removed , he discussed how his aggressive use of plagiarism detection software on student assignments poisoned the classroom atmosphere and tanked his teaching evaluations. As…
For about five years I've been trying to implement a fully conforming C preprocessor for the front end of the CScout refactoring browser. I've found this to be a fiendishly difficult task. Although what I have written can correctly process million-line real-life projects, every once in a while I come across a…
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
Yesterday Mark Reid posted on Twitter a challenge : create a self-referential tweet (one that links to itself). He later clarified that the tweet should contain in its text its own identifier (the number after " /status/" bit should be its own URL). I decided to take up the challenge ("in order to learn a bit about…