3151
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
3152
I don't always use LaTeX, but when I do, I compile to HTML (2013)
Since I haven't published anything in almost two months, let me jot down one thought that has come to mind frequently over the past few months.
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3154
Smoother sailing: Studying audio imperfections in Steamboat Willie
A deep dive into investigating and reducing the flutter distortion on the soundtrack of Steamboat Willie (1928).
3155
CRDTs Turned Inside Out
🔰If CRDTs are new to you, here are some introductory links. - An interactive intro to CRDTs [https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts/] - An introduction to state-based CRDTs [https://www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/the-state-of-a-state-based-crdts/] - CRDTs for non-academics…
3156
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
3157
Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)
(updated, March 2025) How I Started Caring About Heat Exchanger Masks Back in the 90s I started riding my bike to work after a hiatus of a few years. My coworkers would regularly ask me if I was go…
3158
Quicksort with Jenkins for fun and no profit
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
3159
Are we at peak vector database?
Seriously - why do we need all these vector databases? Do we need dozens of them?
3160
ZX Spectrum Raytracer
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
3161
Breaking Free from DRM: Hacking My Air Purifier
I searched the web for a deal on a decent air purifier and the Xiaomi 4 Pro seemed to meet all my requirements. The filter size, scheduler and air volume ticked all the boxes. I set it up and thought nothing of it until last week my room was lit with the ‘ 0% remaining ’ replace filter warning. I had set my unit up to…
3162
Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build
Lessons from leaders at New Relic, Credit Karma, Reforge, Hubspot, Trulia, Intercom, VSCO, and more
3163
Making Rust binaries smaller by default
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
3164
2023 Letter
A walk-and-talk; Crumb; running and tangping; Knausgaard; Elon as Palmer Eldritch; memelords; Chicago as a megacity; Norton; and a pause.
3165
Direct pixel-space megapixel image generation with diffusion models
Scalable high-resolution (megapixel) pixel-space image synthesis.
3166
scrapscript.py
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.
3167
Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the…
3168
Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch
RAWRLAB Games, as an official middleware Nintendo developer, provides an unofficial Godot port for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 development at no cost to approved Nintendo developers that qualify as "Godot Ecosystem Contributors" according to the terms mentioned in this announcement . This port is intended…
3169
Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
I was at cfgmgmtcamp 2019 in Ghent, and did a talk which I think was well received about the need for some Kubernetes configuration management as well as the solution
3170
Unbloating the buffers
What is bufferbloat, why is it bad, and what to do about it
3171
The end of "Useless Ruby sugar": On intuitions and evolutions
I wrote the analysis of “useless sugar” features of Ruby for two months, and I regret nothing.
3172
Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” – Sholto David
3173
SaberVM
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
3174
Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp
Creating standalone Linux applications with lone.
3175
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
An adorable set of release notes
3176
Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
3177
An RNG that runs in your brain
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
3178
Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off
Cloud cost optimization at scale part 1: how we save approx 150k USD a year by simply shutting things off
3179
Forging signed commits on GitHub
Creating fake signed commits
3180
Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?
Today in "our novel form of NIH," why did Bluesky choose not to use a peer-to-peer network when designing the AT Protocol?