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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
We invested 10% to pay back tech debt
Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?
The Shit Show
Well, it happened. We knew it was coming. A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Phony Stark did it. My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but […]
Friday night’s near-disaster at JFK airport
The American plane, a 22 year old Boeing 777-200 (registration N754AN) crossed in front of the Delta jet that was in its takeoff roll. Air traffic control saw this happening and at almost the last possible moment called out to Delta to abort takeoff, out of fear the two planes would collide ("Shit! Delta 1943 cancel…
Making Lenses Practical in Java
How (and why!) to convince the machines to write lenses for you
Rust vs. C++ Formatting
In Rust, if I want to print some 32-bit unsigned value in hex, with the leading 0x, padded out with zeros, I would write that as:
Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent
Preface: I don’t use iCloud. I don’t use an Apple ID. I don’t use the Mac App Store. I don’t store photos in the macOS “Photos” application, even locally. I…
For your next side project, make a browser extension
Reflections on the benefits of tweaking an existing app, instead of starting from scratch.
Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch
A fresh take on the classic rally game with widescreen support, high definition UI, and countless bug fixes.
Subverting the software interview (2021)
Writing code for online games, particularly for mobile or web-based slot games like this one , involves a mix of advanced graphics rendering, real-time networking, security implementations, and intricate game logic. Developers need to balance between performance optimization, cross-platform compatibility, and the…
How to improve Python packaging
There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are…
How I ruined my SEO
In October 2022 traffic to my blog dropped like a stone. What happened?
I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing
My personal site has zero pages indexed by DuckDuckGo and Bing and even searches for my URL return zero results. This post is a description of the problem and the start of my journey to fix it.
MSI's (in)Secure Boot
Before we start, maybe I will quickly explain what Secure Boot is. It is a security feature, which allows our computer to decline booting operating systems that have not been signed by a key that the firmware trusts.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS servers and phased apt updates
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Bayesian statistics and machine learning: How do they differ?
My colleagues and I are disagreeing on the differentiation between machine learning and Bayesian statistical approaches. I find them philosophically distinct, but there are some in our group who would like to lump them together as both examples of machine learning. I have been favoring a definition for Bayesian…
Running KDE Plasma on RISC-V VisionFive-2
New year, new RISC-V Yocto blog post \o/ When I wrote my last post, I did really not expect my brand new VisionFive-2 board to find its way to me so soon… But well, a week ago it was suddenly…
Four thousand weeks
A tribute to the book by Oliver Burkeman, an exploration of time management in the face of human finitude, and addressing the anxiety of “getting everything done.”
Things I Learned from My 2 Year Old Baby Girl
Two years ago I gave birth to the most wonderful person on this planet.
Use.GPU Goes Trad
Old is new again
I don't understand terminals, shells and SSH
Confession time: I don't fully understand how terminals, shells and SSH really work (and my guess is you don't either). And I don't mean the cryptography behind SSH. I mean how SSH and the terminal — and the shell for that matter — interact with one another.
Homelab analog telephone exchange
An introduction to my MCU based fully featured analog telephone exchange, how I mounted it in my home lab powered with batteries for months of use
Counting the transistors in the 8086 processor: it's harder than you might think
How many transistors are in Intel's 8086 processor? This seems like a straightforward question, but it doesn't have a straightforward answ...
How to draw ideas
Great ideas are hard to find. Drawing makes it a lot easier. And fun. How? In a creative process drawing can play four different roles. Let’s say, we want to come up with ideas for…
The iPhone Keyboard – Make It or Break It (2022)
Building the first iPhone's touchscreen keyboard was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the iPhone. Succeed, and the iPhone was possible. Fail, and the iPhone would've been shelved. This is its story.
WInd3x, the iPod Bootrom exploit 10 years too late
This is a write-up of the wInd3x bootrom exploit affecting iPod Nanos from 3rd gen to 5th gen. A ready-made tool to use this exploit is available at github.com/freemyipod/wInd3x .