3571
Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
3572
Hello, PNG
PNG is my favourite file format of all time. Version 1.0 of the specification was released in 1996 (before I was born!) and the format remains widely used to this day. I think the main reasons it stuck around for so long are:
3573
Screenshots as the Universal API
With advancements in machine learning, screenshots are quickly becoming a universal data format. It's now (relatively) easy to extract meaning (image-to-text), layout information (object recognition), text (optical ch...
3574
No Start Menu for You
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) th…
3575
The terminal escape sequences ocean is deep and dark
A few months ago I got to debug and fix an interesting bug in the Csharp virtual terminal library VtNetCore . We use VtNetCore at BastionZero to extract terminal commands in realtime from user terminal sessions as they flow over the wire. This requires feeding the standard out and standard err of a terminal session…
3576
3577
The art of knowing when to quit
Closing time, every new beginning Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah “Closing Time”, Semisonic Have you ever found yourself saying: That movie was…
3578
Hyundai Head Unit Hacking
Standard-class Gen5 navigation
3579
Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan (2020)
Image SourceThe United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why thi…
3580
Datasette is my data hammer
If you're exploring or publishing data, you should give this open source tool a go.
3581
Common Lisp and Music Composition
Once upon a time, there were many music composition software packages, mostly written in Common LISP. To name a few I know, Common Music, Symbolic Composer (not related to the Symbolics Lisp Machine). Common Music is still available in source code but I doubt if anyone is still able to setup that. Symbolic Composer…
3582
Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
3583
Glitching a microcontroller to unlock the bootloader
Back in the summer I was lucky enough to finagle my boss into letting me take Dmitry Nedospasov ( @nedos )’s hardware hacking training . In it I cut my teeth on using an FPGA to interface with target hardware. After implementing a UART we implemented a module that could parse part of Apple’s OneWire, used to negotiate…
3584
Is a venture studio right for you?
This post previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stag…
3585
New make --shuffle mode
I implemented new --shuffle option for GNU make to simulate non-deterministic build order in parallel makefiles.
3586
My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
When I owned Piper N47943, a four seat single engine airplane, I thought it prudent not to fly myself to assignments. I did not want the…
3587
PHP in 2023
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
3588
Why we need to know LR and recursive descent parsing techniques
A couple of people have asked me for my thoughts on part of an article from Tiark Rompf called (roughly) “ Just Write the Parser ” which advocates the use of recursive descent parsing over more “formal” approaches to parsing, at least in the context of teaching compilers. I’m fairly sure I read this article a couple…
3589
3590
How Memory safety approaches speed up and slow down development velocity
Every March, developers worldwide each try to make a roguelike game in less than 168 hours as part of the 7DRL Challenge . Roguelike games are hard , involving procedural level generation, pathfinding, line-of-sight algorithms, and more dijkstra maps than you can imagine.
3591
Quitting the rat race
I'm leaving a comfortable job in a big city because there's more to life than whatever this is.
3592
How my brother's iCloud account was stolen
My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint. This is the story of how he lost control of his iCloud account first (along with years of priceless memories, including my nephew's first steps) and how this couldn't have happened without Apple's incompetent support.
3593
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
Milky Eggs
3594
Major standard library changes in Go 1.20
The second part of a three part look at new features in Go 1.20.
3595
The hardest part of being a junior developer
Even though it was 12 years ago, I still remember what the most stressful part of being a junior developer was.
3596
Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)
Many point to the fact that the Soviet Union collapse occurred as the Soviets were baited into trying to compete with the defense build-up ...
3597
Conditional CSS
CSS is condtional in many ways. In this article, I will go over a few CSS features that we use every day, and show you how conditional they are.
3598
The IAB loves tracking users but hates users tracking them
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more on toothpaste. Or change your…
3599
3600
Reverse engineering a neural network's clever solution to binary addition
While training small neural networks to perform binary addition, a surprising solution emerged that allows the network to solve the problem very effectively. This post explores the mechanism behind that solution and how it relates to analog electronics.