The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
I’ve spent the past several years working with functional programming languages in my free time – primarily Haskell and OCaml. I love both languages but also find aspects of each frustrating. Haskell is terse and elegant with type classes providing a powerful mechanism for ad-hoc polymorphism. However, it can also be…
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
Introduction When modeling a Postgres database, you probably don’t give much thought to the order of columns in your tables. After all, it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t affect storage or performance. But what if I told you that simply reordering your columns could reduce the size of your tables and…
Some thoughts on AI and LLMs, based on being Head of Engineering for JumboCode , a club of 180 students at Tufts University that builds software for non-profits.
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
Efficient software development benefits from local development, it enables faster iteration, better debugging and ensures consistency between local and production environments.
Nick Botticelli's personal website
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
a tragedy of the public emergency system commons...
The road to hell is paved via collaboration, consensus, inclusiveness, stability
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
I’ve been tinkering with arduino-like platforms recently (more on the midi synth soon) and got the idea to make a small message board to leave notes to my girlfriend. This is how I ended up with a simulator, an integration with a demoscene tracker, custom tools to make palette cycling effects, having to learn CAD to…
The speed of light is much faster, and the energy in ordinary objects far greater, than what daily life accustoms us to. Why? Step 1: new perspectives
Close to a year ago, I stumbled upon the Kekz Headphones, which seemed like an interesting approach on the whole digital audio device space. They claimed to work without any internet connection and all of the content already on the headphones itself. They are On-Ear Headphones, which work by placing a small chip (I…
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
Careful with those human analogies
The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 and BSDCan 2025 - Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.
The Black–Scholes formula is the crown jewel of quantitative finance. The formula gives the fair price of a European-style option, and its success can ultimately be measured by its impact on option markets. Before the formula’s publication in 1973 (Black & Scholes, 1973; Merton, 1973) , option markets were relatively…
The first real money I ever made from game development was on Android. It was in 2013, when Android was still the underdog compared to the iPhone, and was being touted as a great platform for developers. I’d taken two weeks to build Patchy, a retro arcade game revamped for touch controls, and published it on the…
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business
Social media isn't toxic, most people just haven't figured out the game (yet)
They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless. The richness of most playing card…
