The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022133 points61 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the long-awaited first part of a series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers…
How Classicists tricked themselves into not learning Latin well.
There is a persistent idea that people work 40 hours a week. They don't, and if you try to do this it will break you. Here are some more reasonable guidelines.
On development teams, balancing priorities while keeping focus is hard. Without an intentional approach you can quickly find your team submerged in a lot of different work, hurting progress on your most important goals. But the real world is messy. Prioritization is hard. Work comes in many shapes and sizes. Unplanned…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points82 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
One of the skills I wish I’d learned earlier in my career is basic Linux server administration. Specifically in relation to hosting something on the web, either a web app or API that I wrote myself, or something from the thriving self-hosted community , such as WordPress. Managing servers is increasingly seen as the…
For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about having a time series DB and visualization tool that is easy to use and light on resources, so it can be used locally for development. Tried se…
How big should your queue be, and what should you do when it fills up? Many times, we implement or even deploy a networking system before w...
One of the things people often complain about when doing Async Rust is cancellation. This has always been a bit confusing to me, because it seems to me that async cancellation should feel a lot like panics in practice, and people don’t complain about panics very often (though they do sometimes). This post is the start…
This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
Everyone seems to be striving for ‘clean’ code at the moment. You can’t read a blog post without the author telling you how clean their approach is. Engineering teams get together and discuss which of the possible solutions is the cleanest. Other developers assure you that they practice ‘clean code’.
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
About a year ago, I was contacted by Masterclass (a subscription-based online education company) on the possibility of producing a series of classes with the premise of explaining mathematical ways…
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I was curious to know if the functionality of VSCode can catch up with the native speed of some editors, such as Sublime. That led me to seek out where some bottlenecks may be and where time is being spent. In this post I look at both the internals and extensions.
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
In the past few months, I’ve twice injured the same ankle while playing with my kids. This, perhaps combined with covid, led me to several indisputable realizations: I am mortal.Despite my se…
Preface Hello friends! It’s been a while. I’ve been finding it very hard to write while holding up a full-time job, and I’ve also been dealing with some very...
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
Why brainstorming doesn't work - and why to do nothing instead
Perverse incentives surrounding best practices
Surviving Hell
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
AirPods are a fantastic product. However, the small annoyances that occur when using them don't allow it to fall under the category of Apple products that "Just Work".
Maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
