391
Fixing the MacBook Pro
Despite my love for the previous Retina MacBook Pro , I won’t be able to use it forever. The best laptop to ever exist should be in the future, not the past.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
392
The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current st…
393
Crazy Eddie Fraud
The Crazy Eddie fraud may appear smaller and gentler than the massive billion-dollar frauds exposed in recent times
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An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...
395
Disassembling Jak and Daxter
I don't work at Naughty Dog, and I don't have any secret knowledge of Jak & Daxter, except what I figured out myself from the disc. So a lot of this may well be wrong. Take a pinch of salt with it.
396
The strange story of “Extended Random”
Yesterday, David Benjamin posted a pretty esoteric note on the IETF’s TLS mailing list. At a superficial level, the post describes some seizure-inducingly boring flaws in older Canon printers…
397
Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc. However, despite the fact that all modern browsers can run ES2015+ code and natively support the features I just mentioned, most developers still transpile their code to…
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Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly Haas et al., PLDI 2017 This is a joint paper from authors at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple describing the motivations for WebAssembly together w…
401
A deep dive into Multicore OCaml garbage collector
I recently gave a talk on the internals of multicore OCaml GC at Jane Street offices in NYC. The slides from the talk are available online . But I felt that the slides alone aren’t particularly edifying. This post is basically the slides from the talk annotated with notes.
402
A reasonably speedy Python ray tracer
Cyrille Rossant's small ray-tracer is an nice self-contained Python program (using NumPy) that renders this 400×300 image in about 15 seconds on a fast PC:
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Fearless concurrency in your microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
405
Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch – C64 Demo Effect (2016)
This article describes the inner workings of Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch ( MISC ), a new C64 demo effect introduced in my demo Lunatico .
406
Java Is Unsound: The Industry Perspective
Discussing a recent academic finding on Java and Scala, from industry's perspective.
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What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
409
The Myers diff algorithm: part 1
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
410
Not Explicit
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
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Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
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Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
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The Ethics of Running a Data Breach Search Service
No matter how much anyone tries to sugar coat it, a service like Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) which deals with billions of records hacked out of other peoples' systems is always going to sit in a grey area. There are degrees, of course; at one end
414
Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
415
“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
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Don't use Git rebase
You love rebasing, right? Rewriting history might be appealing, but there are good reasons not to.
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Smaller Code, Better Code
I was enjoying some pizza the other day with some buddies that know a bit about my research and understand where I am coming from with regards to my own computing aesthetics. They understand that I have always pushed for the smallest code that I can get, and to simplify
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Why is my tcp not reliable? (2009)
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
419
Playing with Kernel TLS in Linux 4.13 and Go
The 1600 LoC patch allows userspace to pass the kernel the encryption keys for an established connection, making encryption happen transparently inside the kernel.
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History of Emacs and vi Keys (2010)
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…