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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 290 posts.
62
Real-time audio programming 101: time waits for nothing (2011)
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
63
Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
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Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
65
jj init – getting serious about replacing Git with Jujutsu
Jujutsu (`jj`) is a new version control system from a software developer at Google. I have been using it full time for 6 months. Here’s why you should switch, too.
66
Scooping the Loop Snooper (2000)
No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…
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Writing down (and searching through) every UUID
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
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Timeline of the xz open source attack
Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also…
70
Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
71
Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
72
Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
73
Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
74
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes
Mac's Tech Blog
75
The Swift compiler is slow due to how types are inferred
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
76
UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
77
The power of two random choices
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
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Pelicans on a bicycle
I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like …
80
Airfoil
Interactive article explaining the physics of an airfoil and what makes airplanes fly
81
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
82
Passkeys: A shattered dream
Firstyear's blog
83
Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
84
The Lunacy of Artemis
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
85
I Lost Faith in Kagi
Issues with Kagi's AI focus, finances and leadership
86
Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting
An experiment in javascript-free syntax highlighting, made possible by opentype contextual alternates and COLR table
87
A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
88
A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.
89
XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams
Some timezone observations on the recently discovered backdoor hidden in an xz tarball.
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How the OCaml type checker works (2022)
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.