631
Sinusoidal Sunlight
The graph of daylight over the course of a year looks like a sine wave, but is it?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
632
Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …
633
How to grip Bronze Age swords
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
634
Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
635
Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
636
RISC-V is currently slow compared to modern CPUs
RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.
637
Async Rust in Three Parts
Async/await, or "async IO", is a new-ish Rust added async/await in 2019. For comparison, C# added it in 2012, Python in 2015, JS in 2017, and C++ in 2020. language feature that lets our programs do more than one thing at a time. It's sort of an alternative to multithreading, though Rust programs often use both…
638
The global surveillance free-for-all in mobile ad data
Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows…
639
Never Missing the Train Again
How I built a transit dashboard with Rust, Skia, and an old Kindle
640
Probably pay attention to tokenizers
Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment, other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on the way you look at it, I suppose. There is a Retrieval-augmented…
641
TLA from First Principles
Building an intuition for the mathematics behind the "TLA" in "TLA+"
642
What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?
Dive deep into the open-source architecture of Lichess.org to understand the technical processes behind making a move in a game.
643
Optimizers need a rethink
Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics
644
Adding row polymorphism to Damas-Hindley-Milner
Intro to HM
645
I got dysentery so you don’t have to
On turning 30 in a human challenge trial ward.
646
Against /tmp
I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea , which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems.
647
MQTT turns 25
October 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of MQTT, a crucial protocol for connecting devices in diverse environments. With origins in lightweight networks, MQTT has flourished, empowering countless a…
648
One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
649
Understanding Gaussians
The **Gaussian distribution**, or **normal distribution** is a key subject in statistics, machine learning, physics, and pretty much any other field that deals with data and probability.
650
Learning to Learn
The fastest way to get better at something is to start slow.
651
Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
Who knew figuring out the lab's occupancy would be so much work?!
652
Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
653
Is it better to fail spectacularly?
Three weeks ago I wrote the following draft of a blog post entitled “Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?”. I am having a lot of doubts. I’ve been training for the Chicago Marathon in earnest since June, but in reality the preparations began a year ago when I was accepted based on my qualifying time from the 2023…
654
IOCCC Flight Simulator (2010)
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
655
OOP is not that bad
OOP is certainly not my favorite paradigm, but I think mainstream statically-typed OOP does a few things right that are very important for programming with many people, over long periods of time.
656
Software engineer titles have almost lost all their meaning
Examining the Devaluation of Software Engineer Titles and Its Impact on Tech Industry Integrity
657
Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript…
658
MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
659
The AI Investment Boom
AI Demand is Driving Skyrocketing US Investment in Computers, Data Centers, and Other Physical Infrastructure
660
What docs-as-code means
I’ve recently started a new job as a documentation engineer. While my work is largely the same as that of a technical writer, …