The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
When I speak about the inefficiency of popular blockchains, or mention that we seem to be hurtling towards a 'web3' so centralized it challenges big tech's firm grasp on today's web, or point out that somehow no one has managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn't be better served by one of the many…
Leveraging grep's exit status and output for simple code checks
What makes learning hard? How can we make it easier? Cognitive load theory explains how we learn and how to do it better.
Using BLAST is easy. I'm going to show you how easy and how to prove that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”
Why best products and leaders are not heroes; they solve 3 layers of every problem
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
a FRAND-ly license for software
Distinguishing the trees from the forest in software engineering and how not to conduct interviews.
How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
A practical Org-mode workflow for calling APIs, working with JSON responses, and querying the resulting data with databases and executable blocks.
Using SMS and MMS gateways we can send text messages to phones from a computer via email. With this strategy we can use a combination of the Python SMTP and email library to send text messages programmatically for free! This not only includes short text messages, but also multimedia messages with pictures, videos, or…
If you imagine a world where the sum of all things you can do with a computer is exactly matched, and locked down for all time with what you can do inside a browser, then the arguments for the web are persuasive. Why write for a specific platform when you can write for all platforms at once and gain the other…
Fighting a pandemic in the world of software
I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to one of …
Regular readers would probably know that I have a love of batteries, and their associated test equipment. Maybe it was the fact that they were expensive, but pervasive, and my enjoyment as a child …
I have done a few previous blog posts on who has contributed to PostgreSQL , but I did not do one last year. A couple people mentioned to me...
I feel like I should have a blog. Specifically, a tech blog. Everything points towards it! I like coding, I like reading, I particularly like reading blog posts . So then, why don't I have one?!
