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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apolog…
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Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
The Estonian government estimates that going digital has saved the state and its citizens, 820 years in time and resources
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Why I am learning category theory
Category theory is a domain of mathematics that exerts a strange influence over programmers. One thing that can be said for sure about category theory is tha...
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The Casino-Chip Society
Why learning to see the layers of money will reveal the politics of 'cashless society', and much more
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Just Say No
Saying yes is easy—at first. It makes you feel better. And it makes you feel like you can do anything! And the person you're saying yes to also gets a happy feeling because you're going to do something for them. Saying no is hard. It's an admission you can't do something. And worse still, you're disappointing someone…
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Quarter-Scale Retrocomputing
Creating a quarter-scale replica of the iconic BeBox computer, complete with blinkenlights and custom case design
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Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem, one library at a time
Most popular libraries can be sped up by avoiding unnecessary type conversions or by avoiding creating functions inside functions.
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Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (2017)
by James Wallace Harris, Friday, January 6, 2017 I first read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder just after it came out in 1981, before it won the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 1982. …
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Dynamic types have the potential to be more than "no static types"
They have potential to be more than "no static types", but that hasn't happened.
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Emacs 29 is nigh
Table of Contents Major features Eglot is now part of Emacs core Tree-Sitter is also part of Emacs core Install packages from source with package.el Org mode 9.6 use-package in Emacs core Pure GTK Emacs is here for Wayland! Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time Native access to SQLite databases HaikuOS support New…
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Working with Tailwind CSS every day for 2 years
For more than two years, I've been using Tailwind CSS almost every working day for company projects and a lot of weekends for my side projects.
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Goodbye, data science
This is more of a personal post than something intended to be profound. If you are looking for a point, you will not find one here. Frankly I am not even sure who the target audience is for this (p…
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Tailwind is a leaky abstraction
Although Tailwind does have some benefits, ultimately it’s just one more thing to learn.
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How do transistors work, anyway?
The internet is littered with explanations of how transistors work. Most of them don't really explain anything.
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Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
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Notes on ExFAT and Reliability (2021)
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
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A Poor Man's API
Creating a full-fledged API requires resources, both time and money. You need to think about the model, the design, the REST principles, etc., without writing a single line of code. Most of the time, you don’t know whether it’s worth it: you’d like to offer a Minimum Viable Product and iterate from there. I want to…
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Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results
Negative prompts can be far superior than traditional prompt additions.
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The Buy and Hold Mindset
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
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Protect me from what I want
Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out…
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How thick is a three-sided coin?
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
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Capsaicin is a psychoactive substance
Capsaicin, the active substance in chili peppers, acts on vanilloid receptors (TRPV1) and alters adrenaline and endorphine levels.
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Intentionally making close friends
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
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Everything I wish I knew when learning C
Learning C was quite difficult for me. The basics of the language itself weren’t so bad, but “programming in C” requires a lot of other kinds of knowledge which aren’t as easy to pick up on:
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SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow
I've been sitting on publishing these notes for a while, because I don't want to diminish the work of the talented people that engineered SwiftUI and plowed through years of AppKit and UIKit code to get to this state. But I'd like to draw attention to some performance limitations, in the hope that a SwiftUI engineer…