The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,212 posts.
A common assumption I see on the ‘net is that NP-complete problems are impossible to solve. I recently read that dependency management in Python is hard because package resolution is NP-complete. This is true in principle, but the reality is more complicated. When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about…
This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do:
We’ve written previously about the fact that the Internet seems to be missing a standard protocol for the request/response paradigm, with repeated attempts to force-fit TCP leading to inevitable mismatches. Sometimes we feel that we are the only people who think this way, with our networking
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
This is my opinionated list of four approaches to building websites and web applications. Publicly hosted on the internet, serving HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc over HTTP.
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
Technical excellence begins in wonder but is honed by disgust
(Spoiler alert: it has been very successful, but there are some lessons to be learned)
It’s Saturday, and I’m enjoying the last sunlight for the day in my studio. The house is silent now; my family is taking a nap downstairs. And I’m here, writing, in silence. There’s a thought that kept coming in the last few weeks. As painful as it is, any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external…
A practical guide to starting a personal blog you can keep for years, without depending on social platforms or fragile tools.
I found myself going down a previously unexplored rabbit hole recently, or more specifically, what I thought was "a" rabbit hole but in actual fact was an ever-expanding series of them that led me to what I refer to in the title of this post as "6 rabbits deep"
Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, ...
I woke up yesterday to the news that DigitalOcean has cut a bunch of jobs from the payroll. It sounds like a pretty big wave, and yes, my job was lopped off
A step-by-step guide to making a landing page with AI and no-code tools: AI-written code and copy, fonts, colour palettes, images, audio and video.
Why I've decided to host my page on my own in home server and how community is building amazing tools like Coolify.
Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…
An illustrated description of what Textmode Art is and how to get started.
So farewell then, Havant station’s 1930s railway toilets. It is doubtful whether many passengers will mourn their loss, but they are another piece of railway heritage that has slipped beyond …
A minimalist, non-commercial take on a handful of indispensable workshop tools.
One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design… Continue reading →
I wanted to convert some .webp images to .png on my Mac. I asked ChatGPT:
Personhood appears to be simpler than we thought
What color is the night sky? Contrary to prevailing views, the moonless night sky is rarely, if ever, black or blue. It is actually much more colorful. In this article, I'll describe some of the colors and the physical reasons for those colors.
