The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this…
Cosmos is the easiest way to design a keyboard around your one-of-a-kind hands. Scan your hand using just your phone camera, then fit a keyboard to the scan. The key positions align to your fingers' lengths and movement.
Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate…
UPDATED: 2025-02-15: Fixed some bugs in the examples and pointed out that you don't usually just want to panic on memory allocation failure.
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions…
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects.
What if something can't be found through Google Search? Does it still exist? That question I have to ask myself when I found that a blogpost...
When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever la…
right to repair laws should include provisions requiring manufacturers to unlock a device's bootloader (to provide root access) upon consumer request.
Retrogames revised.
Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
uv run - install, activate, and run in one command…
This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Watch the video here.
Nearly every line of code I write for fun is in Rust. It's not because I need great performance, though that's a nice benefit. I write a lot of Rust because it's a joy to write code in. There is so much else to love about Rust beyond going fast without segfaults.
Implementing the famous donut.c animation in actual silicon using CORDIC and ray marching
The cargo cult metaphor is commonly used by programmers. This metaphor was popularized by Richard Feynman's "cargo cult science" talk with a...
If you're in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time…
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
There's no reason I should exit vim just to watch a video
Historically, general approaches always win in AI. Founders in AI application space now repeat the mistakes of AI researchers.
Note there is a RP2040 version of this now available Das Blinkenlights (mit RP2040!)
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .
After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
The “range” of a force is a measure of the distance across which it can easily be effective. Some forces, including electric and magnetic forces and gravity, are long-range, able to cau…
Stop Trying To Schedule A Call With Me - The harassment by SaaS
