8131
Haunted by my own projects
Sometimes the new and shiny thing is way more fun than the thing that I genuinely want to ship... later.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,204 posts.
8132
Accidentally writing a SAT solver
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
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MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
8134
Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing
As someone who has from time to time written on parsing, and even published some parsing research , I get asked questions about parsing fairly regularly, some of which I’m even capable of answering.
8135
You can use C-Reduce for any language
C-Reduce is a tool by Regehr and friends for minimizing C compiler bug reproducers. Imagine if you had a 10,000 line long C file that triggered a Clang bug. You don’t want to send a massive blob to the compiler developers because that’s unhelpful, but you also don’t want to cut it down to size by hand. The good news…
8136
Fine, I'll Play With Skiplists
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
8137
Comparing AWS S3 with Cloudflare R2: Price, Performance and User Experience
In September 2021, Cloudflare took the tech world by storm by announcing R2: a storage service accessible through the ubiquitous S3 API but that didn't charge any egress ("bandwidth") fees. You only pay for storage and read/write/delete requests. It was a major kick in the incumbents' balls who all…
8138
Emacs arbitrary code execution and how to avoid it
A post by Eshel Yaron with details and advice about a long standing arbitrary code execution vulnerability in Emacs
8139
The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Ko
You might think it’s unlikely for any interesting mathematics to arise from incense appreciation, but that’s only because you’re unfamiliar with the peculiar character of Muromachi (室町) era Japanese nobles. There has never been a group of people, in any time or place, who were so driven to display their sophistication…
8140
How to print your Guild Wars 2 character
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
8141
Cursed Linear Types in Rust
Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…
8142
Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
8143
The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)
Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...
8144
Forced to upgrade
On finally having to upgrade my iPhone
8145
Rails is better low code than low code
Update 2024-12-02 : There was a lively discussion about the post on Hacker News you might also find interesting: link to thread.
8146
Janet for Mortals (2023)
I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…
8147
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III . The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460…
8148
I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either
I moved my projects from Kubernetes to Google Cloud Run because I did not want to pay for cluster operations, idle capacity, and job-running infrastructure.
8149
Htmy – Async, pure-Python rendering engine
Unleash your creativity with the full power and Python, without the hassle of learning a new templating language or dealing with its limitations!
8150
Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier
Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake , but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a…
8151
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
8152
The industry structure of LLM makers
The Netscapes of AI
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Functional Programming Self-Affirmations
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
8155
A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)
Kenji López-Alt posed a mathematical problem on his YouTube channel about how to best cut an onion. I present a detailed solution.
8156
Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy. All Finns were r...
8157
A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.
8158
Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
A data scientist’s perspective
8159
Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer. It’s called sqlite-utils-ask. Here’s …
8160
Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).