Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 439 posts.
In response to the call for blogs about the vision for Rust for 2020, I’m going to write about GUI. I believe the time is right for a native GUI toolkit written in Rust, and that such a thing would fill a very important niche. There is a demand for performance (which, to me, includes startup time, RAM footprint, and…
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
Updated August 4, 2019: Added link to “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ To Terrorize Young War Dissidents” The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal governme…
Update 26 Sep 2020: A followup to this post is Towards principled reactive UI.
Many people are surprised to learn that `sed`, a seemingly simple text filtering program, is actually Turing complete. This realization prompts the question: how can a text processing utility achieve such computational power? The answer lies in sed's fundamental operations. Essentially, sed functions as a miniature...
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
At Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, I introduced the first Amazon Web Services custom silicon. The ASIC I showed formed the foundational core of our second generation custom network interface controllers and, even back in 2016, there was at least one of these ASICs going…
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the […]
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
Vim 8.1 was released in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termdebug, which provid…
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the…
What this function does is to give you a lumninance-correct grayscale version of any matplotlib colormap. I've found this useful for quickly checking how my plots might appear if printed in black and white, but I think it's probably even more useful for stoking the flame of the internet's general rant against jet .
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: malloc on Linux never fails [due to the obvious cause]. In this post, we’ll show that this indeed is the case, and explore why…
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
It is possible to restrict Google AMP from your life both as a web user and as a web developer. Here’s how you can fight back against Google AMP.
Link to: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1182348757360234497
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult , a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
How many web servers are running on your machine right now? Do all of those development web servers have a secure login, and restrictive CORS permissions? You don’t know? Allow me to check for you:
Open Source, Web Development, and more
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
It is all but impossible to beat an Aggregator head-on, as Walmart is trying to do with Amazon. The solution instead is to build a platform like Shopify.
Here I sit, in a cabin on Lake Superior by the fire, with late-season snow pelting the windows and ominous waves crashing against the rocky shore.
Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single…
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admissio…
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
