271
Forecasts need to have error bars
Richard Rosenfeld in the most recent Criminologist published a piece about forecasting national level crime rates. People complain about the FBI releasing crime stats a year late, academics are wor…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
272
A decade of Have I Been Pwned
A decade ago to the day, I published a tweet launching what would surely become yet another pet project that scratched an itch, was kinda useful to a few people but other than that, would shortly fade away into the same obscurity as all the other ones I'd launched
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Switch off bad TV settings
Watch movies like the makers intended by switching off weird smart tv settings.
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A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique)
A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique), AI-powered improvements, and recent statistics
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AI and Trust
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who…
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From 486 to Vue.js: Evan You's Full-Time Gamble on Open Source
From the early days of exploring creative possibilities on a 486 computer in his childhood to developing one of today's most popular web frameworks, Evan You's journey is a tale of passion and innovation. Evan started Vue.js while working at Google, just wanting to scratch his own itch for a lightweight JavaScript…
277
Kubernetes Needs an LTS
There is no denying that containers have taken over the mindset of most modern teams. With containers, comes the need to have orchestration to run those containers and currently there is no real alternative to Kubernetes. Love it or hate it, it has become the standard platform we have largely
278
The 8-bit era: Eight processor designs
Why do the 8-bit designs of the 1970s still generate so much interest?
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Inércia 2023
Filipe Cruz (aka psenough) invited me to Inércia 2023, a local Demoscene event organized by the Associação Inércia that took place in the infamous Incrível Almadense. I’ve done my fair share of bouncing ball assembly demos in the 80s and others more recently, but I don’t qualify as a demoscener, not even by the lowest…
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A minimum complete tutorial of Linux ext4 file system (2017)
This is a complete tutorial for understanding the basics of Linux ext4 file system.
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The Placeholder Girlfriend
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
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Learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one
In my day job, I work on a JavaScript framework (LWC). And although I’ve been working on it for almost three years, I still feel like a dilettante. When I read…
283
All the hominins made tools
A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.
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The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)
Why I joined my company's CI team to fix Jenkins, the two options we weighed, and what I learned about developer-productivity work.
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A guide to home row mods
What are home row mods? What is a mod-tap? What settings do you need to use? What are the alternatives? And more in this article...
286
Now I can just print that video
It all started with Instagram Reels showing me too many yummy cooking videos. I wanted to try some recipes out myself. But I didn’t want to have to keep my phone in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to have to keep unlocking it to see the next step. I wanted to print the recipe out, and have it on the counter while I was…
287
A Personal History of APL (1982)
October 1982 TR-03.214 A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL by Michael S. Montalbano International Business Machines Corporation General Products Division Santa Teresa Laboratory San Jose, California A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL Introduction I have several reasons for calling this talk a personal history. For one, I want to make it…
288
The analog computer for the Nike missile system (2001)
Nike computer - Installed in class room, not BC van. From Rolf Goerigk Left rack has the power supplies - outputs about 7 different voltages. Top panel is switches, meters, voltage warning lights. (Note: in the van installation, this rack is on the right side of the computer.) Middle two racks - operational amplifies…
289
A new approach to domain ranking
This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery. It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank). The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a…
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Not a real engineer (2019)
A short, dark prose poem on being told you are not a real engineer, and the monstrous thing you become instead.
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Multifaceted: The linguistic echo chambers of LLMs
This is a fun one. I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit staring at LLM output. And there’s something that I’ve noticed: LLM-generated prose has a kind of… vibe. It’s difficult to describe,…
293
The city of the future looks like a former military bunker in Taipei (2016)
Back in 2016, I wrote an article for How We Get To Next on an informal settlement called Treasure Hill, in Taiwan, that could be a prototype for the future of sustainable urban living. How We Get To Next is still online in archived format, but with bitrot being what
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Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)
an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…
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Llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer
Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models (think your own local copy …
297
Should you split that file?
Splitting code into files can scatter related logic. Jimmy Koppel on cognitive load, design reconstruction, and a third way to organize code.
298
"Useless Ruby sugar": Endless (one-line) methods
Or, about the virtue of exactly one phrase.
299
Buggy animation in Atlassian Bitbucket is wasting half a CPU core at all times
I was running some benchmarks the other day. I usually have a lot of things running (Teams, Chrome, IDE, etc…) but I have to close everything to run some tight benchmarks. When I am done, one of th…
300
Code is run more than read
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.