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USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 411 posts.
92
NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
The Black Chamber was founded by the U.S. Army and the U.S. State Department in 1919. The Secretary of State terminated funding in 1929, famously writing that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
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I fought the PayPal and I won
Payment processors hostile to freedom of expression hate me for this one weird trick!!
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I've locked myself out of my digital life
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…
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Just use Postgres for everything
Replace Redis, MongoDB, Kafka & more with PostgreSQL. Reduce complexity, boost development speed. Complete guide with real examples.
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Apple is not defending browser engine choice
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only…
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An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Ranking
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points62 commentscited by 8History & Retro Computing details
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
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Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
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The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
Learn how to organize your digital life in seconds. Stop wasting time looking for information and gain greater focus on what matters most.
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Pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS (2020)
This post describes the implementation and use of pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS.
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What is the small web? (2020)
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
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Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
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The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
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My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal
This statement is issued in response to id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton’s “DOOM Eternal OST Open Letter”, published on Reddit.
108
New(ish) command line tools
A list of new(ish) command line tools
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Write plain text files
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
110
The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
Translations: Chinese, Vietnamese. (V2 Nov 2022: Updated images for more precise description of forward diffusion. A few more images in this version) AI image generation is the most recent AI capability blowing people’s minds (mine included). The ability to create striking visuals from text descriptions has a magical…
111
I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
112
Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes
I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.
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My business card runs Linux
Dmitry.GR: My business card runs Linux (and Ultrix), yours can too. Details, kits, etc...
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Games people play with cash flow
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
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Technical overview of Kandria, a game and game engine developed in Common Lisp
This is a short overview of the development that's gone into "Kandria"(https://kandria.com), the open world action RPG I've been working on in recent years.
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The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
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Serenity OS: Interview
How would you build an operating system? My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP. But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling…
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How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others should take note of?
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How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...