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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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Amish Hackers (2009)
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →
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Writing a Game Boy Emulator in OCaml
For the past few months, I have been working on a project called CAMLBOY, a Game Boy emulator that runs in the browser.
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Rust in 2022
In previous years, the core team have asked the community to write new years blog posts about Rust in the coming year. They haven't this year, but I wanted to write one anyway. However, it turned out to be harder than expected. Perhaps that's due to Rust being in an
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From TypeScript to ReScript
Rewriting the Inhyped.com React frontend in ReScript brought a sound type system and easy JS interop, at the cost of a small community.
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Teaching how to code is broken
Typically: * Chapter 1: Types * Chapter 2: Variables * Chapter 3: Operators/Math * Chapter 4: Control structures * Chapter 5: Arrays * Chapter 6: Functions * Chapter 7: Structs * Chapter 8: Classes and Objects * Chapter 9: Methods * Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism * Chapter 11: Some advanced thing X * Chapter…
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The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing. The newest version of Wi-Fi layers on the ability to sense people or objects by using math…
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Problem solving strategies in a graduate real analysis course (2010)
This is going to be a somewhat experimental post. In class, I mentioned that when solving the type of homework problems encountered in a graduate real analysis course, there are really only about a…
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Is the madness ever going to end?
There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry. It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry.
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Make the “semantic web” web 3.0 again – with the help of SQLite
Before the term was hijacked by crypto-grifters (and, admittedly, a few genuinely neat projects), web 3 (point oh) referred to Tim Berners-Lee's project to promote a standard way to expose and parse metadata on the web. It never took off. In this piece, I'll argue that a breakthrough idea introduced last year by HN…
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CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”
Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.
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The optional chaining operator, “modern” browsers, and my mom
Eric Bailey recently wrote on CSS-Tricks about testing your website on a crappy laptop and it reminded me of this anecdote from my own life. About a month ago…
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I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
and i think you do too - but i'll tell you anyway
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Dear sir, you have built a compiler
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
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On Learning Smalltalk
Summary: In 2021 I learned Smalltalk, mostly using the lovely Pharo implementation. While the syntax of the language is quite nice, it...
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PHP in 2022
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
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Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'
Travel, books, politics, history and opinionating on life in Taiwan.
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Milton Friedman’s Interest Rate Fallacy
Milton Friedman’s interest rate fallacy is one of the most mystifying and counterintuitive facts in modern finance.
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A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming
“Thanks” to the pandemic, I’ve spent much more time figuring out how to deal with video and live streaming than I ever thought I would. It’s turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding experience. In no particular order, here are some things I’ve learned along the way.
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Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)
Data-driven approach to history
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You can build a skyscraper anywhere in Davis, California
Update: Everything in this article about Davis is also currently true in the following cities:
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What NPM should do to stop a new colors attack
Over the weekend, a developer named Marak Squires intentionally sabotaged his popular NPM package colors and his less popular package faker . As I write this, NPM claims 18,971 direct dependents for colors and 2,751 for faker . Open Source Insights counts at least 42,000 more indirect dependents for colors . Many…
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The burden of an Open Source maintainer
Or: Why can't you just merge my ten-line PR already? I maintain over 200 open source projects. Apparently (this is news to me) I am ranked in the top 200 GitHub users by followers, and there are 18,000 forks and 42,000 stars across my repos. On an average day, I see between 50-100 emails across my repositories for…
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An Ode to Ruby
A love letter to Ruby and Rails.
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LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
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Who wrote this shit?
Trashing legacy software is fun. It creates camaraderie.
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Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
If you go out seeking to learn why blockchains and the systems built atop them are apparently the future of our web, you’ll begin to see some common themes. These fall apart under further scrutiny.