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Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
1352
Mysteries of the Griffin iMate and the Apple Extended Keyboard II
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
1353
How to Get or Create in PostgreSQL
And why it is so easy to get wrong...
1354
How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
1355
Starting Hospice
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…
1356
Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
1357
How I Program in 2024
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…
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Enum class improvements for C++17, C++20 and C++23
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…
1359
Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers
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…
1360
A primer on the current state of longevity research
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
1361
Dispatches from the farm upstate
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
1362
Jerk
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.
1363
Making your own hot sauce
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…
1364
Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason
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.
1365
You can contribute to KDE with non-C++ code
Lots of underrated areas to work on
1366
How I Use "AI"
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.
1367
Evaluating a class of infinite sums in closed form
A family of infinite sums that evaluate to rational numbers, sometimes integers, and and effective algorithm for finding the sum.
1368
Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
1369
Parsing Protobuf Definitions with Tree-sitter
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your defin…
1370
How to build quickly
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 […]
1371
Revisiting Linux CPU Scheduling
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.
1372
Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
1373
Clang vs. Clang
This is a blog post about an experiment with Clang. I need to explain some context first.
1374
Primitive Recursive Functions for a Working Programmer
Programmers on the internet often use Turing-completeness terminology. Typically, not being Turing-complete is extolled as a virtue or even a requirement in specific domains. I claim that most such discussions are misinformed --- that not being Turing complete doesn't actually mean what folks want it to mean, and is…
1375
"We ran out of columns"
Oh the merchants2 table? Yeah, we ran out of columns on merchants, so we made merchants2
1376
Quark Stars
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
1377
Programming a CH32v003 with light
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
1378
PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
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How I got my laser eye injury
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…