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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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On 17th century "cocaine"
A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca
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Bridge to Nowhere
Taking a closer look at the opening act of a glioblastoma diagnosis.
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Conway's Gradient of Life
What happens if we start from this configuration and take a single step of the game? Here is a snapshot of the next generation:
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On the Nature of Time
Stephen Wolfram takes a computational view of time, defining it abstractly, and the implications from computational irreducibility.
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Don't let dicts spoil your code
I restricted the use of dicts in my code to make it easier to follow and maintain. Here's my explanation of the benefits and advice on what you can use instead. Bonus point: what to do with all the legacy code when there's no time to eradicate all the dicts.
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Practices of Reliable Software Design
It should have good performance and be able to hold many entries. Reads are more common than writes. I know how I would do it already, but I’m curious about your approach.
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A modest critique of Htmx
At work, we really like the basic simple idea of Htmx. Based on using Htmx in a non-trivial user interface, across a team, we’ve found that the following cases are actually not simple and are quite complicated.
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Research in psychology: are we learning anything?
OR: The mystery of the televised salad
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Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
Look, here's the thing, I don't like mysteries that involve technology. I think I hate them because I know that some other human created the...
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My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine
https://youtu.be/nVRzCstyspQ
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Do U.S. ports need more automation?
On October 1st, 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), primarily dockworkers on East and Gulf Coast ports, went on strike after failing to agree contract terms with USMX, an alliance of port operators and employers.
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The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.
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An illustrated proof of the CAP theorem (2018)
The CAP Theorem is a fundamental theorem in distributed systems that states any distributed system can have at most two of the following three properties.
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Windows dynamic linking depends on the active code page
Windows paths have been WTF-16 -encoded for decades, but module names in the import tables of Portable Executable are octets. If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec — then the dynamic linker must somehow decode those octets into Unicode in order to construct a lookup path. There are multiple…
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Sam Altman Goes Full Emperor
His boundless ambition is putting AI, and the world, on a dangerous path.
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Fun with Go Iterators
Go 1.23 added Iterators, so lets build a js like streaming api
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Building a single-page app with Htmx
People talk about htmx as though it's saving the web from single-page apps. Well, I guess I missed the memo, because I used htmx to build a single-page app.
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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
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Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter?
Before you can write an exploit, you need a bug. When there are no bugs, we have to get creative—that's where Fault Injection comes in. Fault injection can take many forms, including software-controlled data corruption, power glitching, clock glitching, electromagnetic pulses, lasers, and more.
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Automating processes with software is hard
We have decades of experience trying to automate processes. My biggest lesson is that automation is not about the easy and known flow, but about exception handling.
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Warm Handoffs
Warm Handoffs are a procedure I’ve implemented with several teams and organizations to improve communication and collaboration in Slack. As organizations grow and ownership shifts and splits as teams are formed and re-formed, Slack channels proliferate, and it gets harder for folks across an org to know the…
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Could we build a computer designed to last at least fifty years? (2021)
The computer built to last 50 years par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Day Rates (2023)
One year ago, I switched from charging project fees to day rates. It’s been transformative on lots of fronts. > Everything below comes with the following preface/caveat: > 1. There’s no univers…
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How do HTTP servers figure out Content-Length?
Anyone who has implemented a simple HTTP 1.1 server can tell you that it is a really simple protocol. Basically, it's a text file that has some specific rules t…
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Fast B-Trees
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
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Google’s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon
Google’s NotebookLLM is the first AI podcast I’d actually listen to. Give it a web page or document, and it will generate you a podcast about it.
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Rust needs a web framework
I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust, mostly for the web, and this is where we run into a problem.
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AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted
How a modern AVX instruction shares a similar design with a 1985 blitter chip, by Arnaud Carré