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"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software
I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes something is ju...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,206 posts.
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Beating the Compiler
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
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Hackers Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers
AT&T Corp. disclosed today that a new data breach has exposed phone call and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all of its customers. AT&T said it delayed disclosing the incident in response to “national security and public safety concerns,” noting that some of the records included data that…
9394
Summing ASCII encoded integers on Haswell at almost the speed of memcpy
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
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As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)
Companies are willing to lay off employees despite being profitable.
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Using S3 as a Container Registry
For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You heard it right…
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Beating the L1 cache with value speculation (2021)
If we have a heuristic to guess some value cheaply, we can remove a data dependency in a tight loop using the branch predictor. This allows the CPU to run more instructions in parallel, increasing performance. If this explanation does not make much sense to you, keep reading to learn about some of the magic making…
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Three years in North Korea as a foreigner (2021)
Surviving 3 years in North Korea as a foreign diplomat was not easy. Living and working in the Hermit Kingdom was certainly the unique experience of a lifetime.
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General Theory of Neural Networks
From gene regulatory networks to artificial neural networks
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We need visual programming. No, not like that
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
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Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen…
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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that…
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The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)
Maintaining a resume is not the most interesting use of time. Naturally, when I needed to bring my own up to date, I decided to spend a great deal more time on it and overengineer the process.
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First Contact with SQLite
I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
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Engineering principles for building financial systems
Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.
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Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
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Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)
If you’ve read my first post about assembly language, you might expect that this is another post on how to understand assembly language. I will write more about that at some point, but this post is not that. Instead, this post is going to talk about some of the weird things and random trivia I learned while writing an…
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Samsung's abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick
Tooting photos on the go from Samsung WiFi cameras with a $20 LTE stick
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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
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Knowledge Graphs in RAG: Hype vs. Ragas Analysis
A deep dive on Microsoft's GraphRAG paper found questionable metrics with vaguely defined lift, so I analyzed knowledge graphs in RAG overall using Neo4j vs FAISS
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Scoped Propagators
A programming model for spatial canvases
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
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Dynamic translation of Smalltalk to WebAssembly
continuing with the DNA theme… In Catalyst, a WebAssembly implementation of the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine, there are three linguistic levels in play: Smalltalk, JavaScript (JS), and WebAs…
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The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
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Real-time audio programming 101: time waits for nothing (2011)
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
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State of Text Rendering 2024
[Leave comments: Google Docs , Hacker News , LWN , typo.social , X , reddit , phoronix ]
9420
Making my own wedding rings
I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…