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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1
A new series that reviews 21 different microcontrollers — all less than $1 — to help familiarize you with all the major ecosystems out there.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Changes at Basecamp
At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company…
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My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
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DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source
A plea for DigitalOcean to stop making open source maintainers' lives miserable, once a year every year.
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How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
It all started with an email. From: Amazon Web Services LLC Subject: Review of your AWS Account Estimated Month to Date Billing Charges...
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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
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An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options
There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to stock options, and I'd like to try and clear some of that up today. As an engineer, you may be more interested in getting on with your job than compensation. However, if you're working at
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Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆
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Vibe engineering
I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to …
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Suspicious Discontinuities
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
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They're made out of meat (1991)
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first…
2174
The impossible dream of USB-C
I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.
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The Product-Minded Software Engineer
Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide
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CAN Injection: Keyless car theft
This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.
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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.
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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Right versus pragmatic
At a previous job, the shared men’s bathroom for the floor was laid out like this:
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Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
Accessing Wolfram|Alpha's computational knowledge with ChatGPT--an ideal combination of precise computation with human-like expression of ideas. Stephen Wolfram explains how.
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NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
2184
The microhydro plant
setting up a microhydro installation
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Visual Information Theory (2015)
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this.
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The MIT License, Line by Line
171 words every programmer should understand
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Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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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...