The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vaccuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to…
Several years ago I actually cared about the differences between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Namely, that Terraform did not provide…
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it.
One of the guest lecturers aboard the ship [1] (Donald Gibbs, of Pearl-Harbor conspiracy-theory infamy) gave a very interesting talk a few ...
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
“If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.” —Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award Lecture (1972)
Relying on the built-in motherboard headers on server grade motherboards to reliably control fans with Linux has been a crapshoot since forever. I'm pleased to report that last summer the Corsair Commander Pro received native Linux kernel driver support in the 5.9 release.
It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
Back in April I wrote Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint about the catastrophic carbon emissions of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as B...
If you are a backend developer like me, logging is the window to your application. Unlike in the frontend, there’s not much to see except of your log messages. Here are some of my personal guidelines I use when I write logs.
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
Filing taxes in America sucks. Your options are to do it by hand, pay someone like Intuit, or if you are below a certain income threshold get some tax software for free. The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to…
Are you smart? Are you curious? Which one is better? Well, in this post, you will see why curiosity is better than being smart.
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to…
Convincing yourself that following more famous people online will lead to a better life is dangerous. You're simply wasting your time.
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
Brave and Firefox implement support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme. Brave to hijack Bing search links. Plus, the history of all this anti-competitive crap.
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
The creation of the original Macintosh has been extensively studied and written about, but what happened after it launched? What was it like to own a Macintosh in the mid-eighties? I intend to tell this story of the Macintosh through the pages of MacUser.
The score bar at the bottom of the screen during a football game has an obvious function: It tells you how many points a team has scored. In some cases, such as the 2021 Chicago Bears, this function is ceremonial. Nonetheless, we primarily use the score bar as an information
Programmers often need to 'filter out' data. Suppose that you are given a database of users where only a small percentage are 'paying customers' (say 5% or less). You can write an SQL query to check whether a given user is indeed a paying customer, but it might require a round trip to your database … Continue reading…
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
A few months ago I moved to a few acres in the country, and needed somewhere to work - so I built myself a solar powered off grid office out of a Tuff-Shed Pro Studio! On one side, I’ve built a great desk corner with plenty of power and more than enough AC to keep me cool when it’s over 100F out.
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
The answer should be something close to ALPHA , i.e. 0.01 . What R was printing out was weird numbers like 1e-10 .
