The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,206 posts.
Narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources are superior to broadband (white) light for scanning color negative film; there are very good reasons why all commercial film scanners use RGB. ( film scanners were using blue LEDs at least a decade before they would be widely used in consumer products! ) Scanning film with…
This is by my brother, Sam. I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%. This goal will be achieved through a high-level design overhaul…
The context is smarter than you.
I’ve been using the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 as my daily driver for a few years now. Laptops (gaming laptops especially) pack a lot of heat-generating components in a small and thin space, where the only airflow comes from the small blower fans in the system. In the case of the Zephyrus G15, there’s approximately 120…
Using `mdb` and `pmap` to find the cause of a crash.
Over the course of working on PSRayTracing (PSRT), I've been trying to find all sorts of tricks and techniques to squeeze out more performance from this C++ project. Most of it tends to be alternative algorithms, code rewriting, and adjusting data structures. I thought sprinkling the final keyword like an all purpose…
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
And why it is so easy to get wrong...
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
I’m entering hospice. It’s time, and realistically past time. The squamous cell carcinoma tumors are growing, and the two doses of spot radiation I got on June 10 and 12 have utterly destroyed what…
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
I talk a lot here about using computers freely , how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm…
The evolution of the C++ language continues to bring powerful features that enhance code safety, readability, and maintainability. Among these improvements, we got changes and additions to enum class functionalities across C++17, C++20, and C++23. In this blog post, we’ll explore these advancements, focusing on…
Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow! Except they don’t…
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
I like hot sauces. My favourite is Ring of fire, a hot sauce that I first encountered in the US. It is a mix of habanero and serrano chillis, tomatoes, vinegar and spices. It is very tasty and (des…
tl;dr: high_impact is small game engine for 2D action games. It's written in C, compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as to WASM for the Web. It's “inspired by” my original Impact JavaScript game engine from 2010. The name high_impact is a nod to a time when C was considered a high level language.
Lots of underrated areas to work on
I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them.
A family of infinite sums that evaluate to rational numbers, sometimes integers, and and effective algorithm for finding the sum.
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your defin…
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]
Disclaimer: This is to the best of my knowledge. It's a complicated topic, there are tons of options, and this only covers a tiny fraction of this topic anyway. If you spot mistakes, please tell me.
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
This is a blog post about an experiment with Clang. I need to explain some context first.
