The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,211 posts.
The phrase “foundations of mathematics” is bandied about frequently these days, but it’s clear that there is widespread confusion about what it means. Some say that a proof assistant must be based on a foundation of mathematics, and therefore that the foundations of mathematics refers to some sort of formal system…
I need to vent about the impolite piece of yet-to-become e-waste on wheels that is my rude-ass car . You've heard versions of this story before, nothing is particularly novel in the shock department, enshittification is everywhere, etcetera... but I need the catharsis.
In short, after a Linux kernel update (6.5.8-200.fc.x86_64 on Fedora KDE), I can't use the top button of my pen on my tablet. This is really affecting my digital painting workflow!
Total payments uberfication is a virus, and we need to build resistance to it
If we go through the list of C++23 features, we can stumble upon the notion of garbage collection twice. Once among the language and once among the library features. Both entries refer to the same paper (P2186R2): garbage collection (GC in short) support is getting removed from C++. Just to make it clear, it’s not…
I've been trying to invest more and more of my free time interacting with founders. I genuinely feel we've been through a lot with Sentry and I can provide some useful value to others. More so, I believe most people in this industry, most successful people, do others a disservice but not having honest conversations…
Bear Blog has a few design constraints for speed, efficiency, and stability. There are many great open-source, privacy-focussed analytics platforms out there...
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
Order by in aggregates, better string concatenation, and thorough date formatting.
Programming lessons I’ve learnt over the last 7 years.
Introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. Chips were soon introduced to handle the low-level aspects...
This article is a deep dive into my experimentations with Volumetric rendering and how to leverage it to render beautiful raymarched cloudscapes in React Three Fiber and WebGL. In it, I walk you through everything from the basics of Volumetric Raymarching to the techniques used in video games to render physically…
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
Learn how CPUs work, and discover Apple’s underrated competitive advantage.
The struggle for distinction
An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
In the past week I went to add Python 3.12 support to my zstandard Python package. A few hours into the unexpected yak shave / rat hole, I decided to start chronicling my experience so that I may share it with the broader Python community. My hope is that by sharing my (unfortunately painful) end-user experience that…
Searchable Human Knowledge
How to use a company's TXT records to discover the products they use.
Is it that time of the year again? A new intellectual minted. The loss of next few evenings watching YouTube, reading substacks? All for that sweet nectar of a novel “hot take”.
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
I first read about the “ blue ocean ” strategy in a story (probably in Edge magazine ) about the Nintendo Wii . While its competitors were fighting for supremacy in the game-console market by producing ever-more-powerful hardware capable of high-definition visuals, Nintendo chose not to join this fight. The pursuit of…
In about 10 years, Apple has multiplied by 19 the number of transistors in its mobile processors. It corresponds roughly to a steady rate of improvement of 34% per year on the number of transistors, or a doubling every 2.5 years. In real dollars, an iPhone has roughly a constant price: the price tag of … Continue…
