The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…
Date: March 7, 2111
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
Well, not this one. But this one is! How? Let’s take a closer look at Bluesky and the AT Protocol that underpins it. Note: I communicated with the Bluesky team prior to the publishing of this post. While the functionality described is not the intended use of the application, it is known behavior and does not constitue…
Last week I wanted to replace my OpenVPN setup with WireGuard. The basics were well-documented, going beyond the basics was a bit trickier. Let me teach you want I learned. The basics But first, let’s summarize the basics. I have a server with a hosting provider that I want to use as a VPN server. I won’t delve into…
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
Mac's Tech Blog
Crafting beautiful HTML glass UI inspired by AAA game development.
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silico...
There’s a right and wrong way to proceed. Here’s how to increase the chances your leader listens and takes action--while reducing the chance they feel threatened.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
i talk about how the idea of a humanity-saving tech revolution from the usual tech suspects is dead (for me).
i vent about return to office bullshittery.
Print good, not bad!
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…
Writing an interpreter for a custom bytecode opens the door for rendering interactive custom Winamp skins in the browser
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
How Dostoevsky’s Crafted Timeless Art
Exactly 15 years ago on November 9th, 2009, I got my first MacBook and started learning how to build apps. I was fascinated with the idea that you can build something that other people will find useful and enjoy using. I also heard about those "indie developers" on Twitter who
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on…
I ran across two surprising sources of code execution in bash (and probably other shells) recently.
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
Low level software usually has lots of .cc or .rs files. Even lower-level software, like your cryptography library, probably has .S containing assembly, my least favorite language for code review.
Update : I forgot that I did a brief analysis on this many years ago, using ROT13 as example.
(“make LLMs play better with one weird trick”)
