8161
Why I have resigned from the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,204 posts.
8162
DELETEs Are Difficult
Why are database DELETEs complex and inefficient? Uncover challenges from physical data removal to autovacuum, and find strategies for managing large deletions.
8163
A Day in the Life: The Global BGP Table
Update: This article was discussed on Hackernews Much has been written and a lot of analysis performed on the global BGP table over the years, a significant portion by the inimitable Geoff Huston.
8164
How I configure my Git identities
This may be overkill, but it works on my machine
8165
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Cassette Vision
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
8166
Making Your Connection Bad
This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…
8167
RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)
Date: March 7, 2111
8168
The two factions of C++
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
8169
This website is hosted on Bluesky
Well, not this one. But this one is! How? Let’s take a closer look at Bluesky and the AT Protocol that underpins it. Note: I communicated with the Bluesky team prior to the publishing of this post. While the functionality described is not the intended use of the application, it is known behavior and does not constitue…
8170
WireGuard: Beyond the most basic configuration
Last week I wanted to replace my OpenVPN setup with WireGuard. The basics were well-documented, going beyond the basics was a bit trickier. Let me teach you want I learned. The basics But first, let’s summarize the basics. I have a server with a hosting provider that I want to use as a VPN server. I won’t delve into…
8171
Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
8172
A career-ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
8173
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes
Mac's Tech Blog
8174
Frosted glass from games to the web
Crafting beautiful HTML glass UI inspired by AAA game development.
8175
Antenna Diodes in the Pentium Processor
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silico...
8176
How to give a senior leader feedback without getting fired
There’s a right and wrong way to proceed. Here’s how to increase the chances your leader listens and takes action--while reducing the chance they feel threatened.
8177
Revisiting the DOS Memory Models
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
8178
Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
8179
The tech utopia fantasy is over
i talk about how the idea of a humanity-saving tech revolution from the usual tech suspects is dead (for me).
8180
The 'Return to Office' Lies
i vent about return to office bullshittery.
8181
Don’t look down on print debugging
Print good, not bad!
8182
Baby’s Second Garbage Collector
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
8183
Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
8184
Against the Dark Forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
8185
Phased Array Microphone (2023)
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…
8186
Rendering "modern" Winamp skins in the browser
Writing an interpreter for a custom bytecode opens the door for rendering interactive custom Winamp skins in the browser
8187
How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
8188
What made Dostoevsky's work immortal
How Dostoevsky’s Crafted Timeless Art
8189
Lessons from 15 Years of Indie App Development
Exactly 15 years ago on November 9th, 2009, I got my first MacBook and started learning how to build apps. I was fascinated with the idea that you can build something that other people will find useful and enjoy using. I also heard about those "indie developers" on Twitter who
8190
From string to AST: parsing (2019)
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on…