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Website search hurts my feelings
Searching and displaying results isn't hard, why do so many websites suck at it?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,209 posts.
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A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
11344
Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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Lab Notebooks (2020)
What wet-lab chemistry can teach software engineers
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The life and death of open source companies
More thoughts on Open Source licensing and companies.
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Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
Challenging projects every programmer should try
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
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Reproducible Git Bundles
Describes how to create reproducible and deterministic one-file bundles of git repositories for use cases such as backups.
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Non-interactive SSH password authentication
Instead of using sshpass to non-interactively provide an SSH password, here is a simpler approach by harnessing the built-in features of OpenSSH...
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The C++20 Naughty and Nice List for Game Devs
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
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Post-apocalyptic life in American health care
Experiences navigating disintegrating American health care institutions, and what they might imply for life in 2037
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Fake It 'Til You Fake It
Since Google’s introduction of its Pixel 8 phones earlier this month, it has been interesting and a little amusing to me to read the reactions to its image manipulation tools. It feels like we have been asking the same questions every year — questions like what is a photograph, anyway?, and has technology gone too […]
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
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"Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models"
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…
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Costs of running a macOS app studio business
I created The low-tech guys, a brand under which I develop macOS apps for a living. I started this business with a good friend of mine, thinking I could help him stop working long hours at his consulting job and ease into more creative work. However, getting to a state where you earn enough to live off the app sales…
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Resetting the timer in my toothbrush
It’s still good to use, I swear
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Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020)
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
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Xmas.c (1988)
The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…
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Bayesians moving from defense to offense
Erik van Zwet, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, Steve Goodman, and I write :
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Understanding every byte in a WASM module
In my last post, we explored how to build WASM modules, both with and without WASI support, using Clang. In a comment on Reddit, it was mentioned that much of the setup I walked through in that post could be avoided by just leveraging Zig’s WASI supprt. This is a great point, and I would recommend doing the same. The…
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Let me repeat that back to you
Two-phase commit for humans
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Was BASIC that horrible or better?
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
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How Pinterest scaled
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
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How Many People? Ancient Demography
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
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Having a game I'm into makes every day enjoyable
About a month ago, I became hooked on mahjong, the ultimate game. It’s a bit late in my life to start, but that’s how it is. In the past, I might have thought, “Playing games like this would be ruinous, leading to personal downfall.” But now, as I’ve grown older, I’ve stopped worrying about these
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How big is YouTube?
How big is YouTube? It's not easy to find out, but we did two years of research and figured out how...
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Shitflation, shrinkflation, inflation database
A recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food: YouTube Channel 4