1141
Marketing to Engineers (2001)
I am a chemical engineer and have been writing copy designed to sell products and services to engineers for 10 years. Here’s what I know about appealing to this special audience:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
1142
New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China's 'Volt Typhoon'
Malicious hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director , a software product used by many Internet and IT service providers. Researchers believe the activity is linked to Volt Typhoon , a Chinese cyber espionage group focused on infiltrating critical U.S. networks and laying the groundwork for the…
1143
MiniJinja: Learnings from Building a Template Engine in Rust
Learnings from building MiniJinja, a template engine in Rust
1144
Notes on Buttondown.com
We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this was the biggest capital expenditure I've ever made, and though it was coming from cash flow generated by B...
1145
Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
1146
Erasure Coding for Distributed Systems
An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.
1147
Eating the Birds of America: Audubon's Culinary Reviews of America's Birds
On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to…
1148
Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Like Heroku, but you own it.
1149
Leader Election with S3 Conditional Writes
In distributed systems, for instance when scaling out some workload to multiple compute nodes, it is a common requirement to select a leader for performing a given task: only one of the nodes should …
1150
Pie doesn't need to be original unless you claim it so
View this post in browser Your pie doesn't need to be original (unless you claim it so) Imagine you bake a delicious peach pie over the weekend, and you...
1151
Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
A rundown of my experience finding and fixing a bug in the Chromium/Google Chrome browser - specifically in the devtools. It includes details about the bug itself as well as notes about what it was like working on the Chromium project as a first-time contributor.
1152
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
1153
Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better
You know the nagging feeling that your product, project, or company has become more complicated than it needs to be? You can solve many problems and get better results by doing something unthinkable to many: removing parts that once seemed essential. My crusade against complexity continues with this short story
1154
Server Setup Basics for Self Hosting
My post on how I like to manage servers. I cover SSH, networking, log rotation, and server management basics.
1155
Writing a Rust compiler in C
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
1156
Pi Pico 2 Extreme Teardown
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
1157
Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)
Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term . What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?
1158
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
1159
TIL: Versions of UUID and when to use them
About a month ago [1] , I was onboarding a friend into one of my side project codebases and she asked me why I was using a particular type of UUID. I'd heard about this type while working on that project, and it's really neat. So instead of hogging that knowledge for just us, here it is: some good uses for different…
1160
1161
Linux Pipes Are Slow
Errata: Some significant mistakes were pointed out to me by email by Brendan MacDonell. I have included errata, but the results might not be reliable, so take this with pinch of salt! vmsplice is too fast Some programs use a particular system call “vmsplice” to move data faster through a pipe. Francesco already did a…
1162
Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
Lidl is launching sovereign cloud computing in Europe. GDPR and data compliance is driving the EU to look for local alternatives.
1163
Programming terrain from scratch using C++ and OpenGL by Shamus Young (2006)
UPDATE 2/20/2006: After about a month, the project is now finished. You can go through the series and read my explanations for each step, or you can just page through and gander at the pretty pictures. If you’re the impatient sort, you could just jump to part 10 right now and see how it turned out.
1164
From Datalog to SVG
Exporting graph data to text file and SVG with Datalog
1165
How de-Googled is Lineage OS?
Lineage OS is based on the Android Open-Source Project, whose primary maintainer is Google. To what extent can it be considered Google-free?
1166
The Tao of Unicode Sparklines (2021)
I’ve long been enamored of the sparkline, a graphical device which its inventor Edward Tufte defines thusly: A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolu…
1167
If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 11
1168
Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
1169
1170
Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
Generate calendar entries from an image using Anthropic Claude 3.5. Convert lesson dates in an image to a calendar ICS file