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Safe relational database queries using the Rust type system
New database library for Rust
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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Gratitude despite the odds
Joseph Brodsky, on being grateful
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Make the most of your burl
Elegant, Exquisite, Museum Quality Lidded Finial Vessels and Urns hand made by Woodturner and Artist, Cindy Drozda. Woodturning instruction, Demonstrations and Instructional DVDs.
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The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024130 points62 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
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Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Last year, I created Fake Parallel Printer , a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.
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If not React, then what?
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
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Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US
Seemingly, at the drop of a hat the morning of Friday, Nov 15th, Deye-branded inverters across the US were intentionally bricked.
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Making a parallel Rust workload 10x faster with (or without) Rayon
In a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores.Disappointingly, my benchmarks showed that this only provided a 2x speedup for my workload, on a computer with 8 CPU threads.Worse, the total “user” and “system” times…
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The deterioration of Google
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
281
Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
In this blog post, I will talk about my successful experiment in machine learning using TensorFlow to automate solving the 4Chan CAPTCHA.
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The Influence of Bell Labs
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a generator of new technology.
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Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo
I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…
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PR process killing morale and productivity
Code reviews are supposed to be about improving code quality and sharing knowledge, but when PR comments start hitting the hundreds, something is very wrong....
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Using Pandoc and Typst to Produce PDFs
UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst. Please see the new post (Mar 26, 2025) at A New Typst Template for Pandoc
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How much memory do you need in 2024 to run 1M concurrent tasks?
Please refer to How Much Memory Do You Need in 2024 to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks? - Take 2 to check the latest result.
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Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Practical accounting for fintech engineers, and also how not to repeat my silly mistakes.
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Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US)
Hetzner raises prices This morning I received an email from Hetzner stating that they are raising prices in the US while significantly reducing bandwidth. The largest price percentage increase is 27.52% for CPX21 servers, and the smallest is 4.17% for CX3+ servers. Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average…
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An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for LLM Interpretability
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become popular for interpretability of machine learning models (although sparse dictionary learning has been around since 1997). Machine learning models and LLMs are becoming more powerful and useful, but they are still black boxes, and we don’t understand how they do the…
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The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
Reflecting on my most successful open source project.
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The UX of Lego Interface Panels (2020)
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
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A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)
A Pretty Map of the European Power Grid
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Haunted by my own projects
Sometimes the new and shiny thing is way more fun than the thing that I genuinely want to ship... later.
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Accidentally writing a SAT solver
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
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MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
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Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing
As someone who has from time to time written on parsing, and even published some parsing research , I get asked questions about parsing fairly regularly, some of which I’m even capable of answering.
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You can use C-Reduce for any language
C-Reduce is a tool by Regehr and friends for minimizing C compiler bug reproducers. Imagine if you had a 10,000 line long C file that triggered a Clang bug. You don’t want to send a massive blob to the compiler developers because that’s unhelpful, but you also don’t want to cut it down to size by hand. The good news…