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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,213 posts.
Scalability is overrated
Startup founders like to think about scalability—and that’s usually a good thing. But overly focusing on scalability overlooks one of the biggest advantages that startups have over larger companies.
A Solar Kiln to dry wood. Overview, design and build (2019)
The solar kiln is based on the well know Virginia Tech design, adapted for my own needs and materials I could find easily on local hardware stores. Mine is a small one, with a gross storage space inside of about 1.5 m in length, 0.85 m wide and 0.65 high (~5’ x 2.75’ x 2’ ).
Understanding the limits of large language models
Reading level: No programming knowledge required, but trying ChatGPT first is advised.
Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited
Back in 2017 I wrote an article in which I attempted to explain how YouTube works under the hood, how it serves streams to the client, and also how you can exploit that knowledge to download videos from the site. The primary goal of that write-up was to…
ESP32 Buyer’s Guide: Different Chips, Firmware, Sensors
The ESP 32 was the most fun side project for me in 2022. For those who don’t know: the ESP32 is a small, cheap and wifi-enabled microchip. Many smart devices that you buy on Amazon have an ESP32 inside. It’s really amazing what you can do with a board that costs less than a good sandwich.
Design your pricing and tools so you can adapt them later
In this blog post I’ll talk about three pricing architecture concepts that I think are really important in modern billing – designing pricing and packaging to be adaptable. I’ll build upon the experience our billing infrastructure team had at Pleo, which has allowed us to expand to new geographies, currencies, and…
AMD Killed the Itanium (2005)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Rewrite, refactor, or reinvent? Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories (2019)
<p>A new take on the age-old question: Should you rewrite your application from scratch, or is that “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”? Turns out there are more than two options for dealing with a mature codebase.</p>
The Linux Upskill Challenge
The Linux Upskill Challenge (https://github.com/livialima/linuxupskillchallenge) as done by Leo Robinovitch
Why did The Beatles get so many bad reviews?
An inquiry into how critics stumble
43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief
Personal blog and website of Lennart Koopmann.
Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Adding C-style for loops to Python (2022)
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Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work
Imagine you had a dog. You got the dog when it was young, trained and raised it. This animal was a part of your family and you gave it little collars and cute little clothes with your family name on it. The dog came to special events and soon thought
ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
Or 10 tweets about ChatGPT
Why Is Everyone So Boring?
Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning.
Reversing UK mobile rail tickets
The UK has used small credit-card sized tickets to pay for train travel for years and years, since long before I was born — originally theAPTIS ticket1,which...
Haskell is not category theory
What, why, who?
Shipping Graphing Calculator
I've been on many projects that get canceled. We're building cool stuff. We're going above and beyond, and we're excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on. But what if I didn't let a project…
A 50-year quest: My personal journey with the second law of thermodynamics
Follow Stephen Wolfram's evolution of research on the 2nd Law from early interest as a 12-year-old to his current findings in the Wolfram Physics Project. View a large collection of images of early and published works.
Against risk-based authentication (or, why I wouldn't trust Google Cloud)
If you were deciding on whether to use AWS, Azure or Google Cloud for a production application, what factors would you use to make the decision? There are probably many such factors you might think of, but I'd like to point out one that probably isn't commonly considered: the relative trustworthiness of Google's…
Eton and all the murder (2019)
As recent politics illustrates, Eton has a reputation for producing pupils who achieve high office, but who are not sufficiently competent to hold high office. One thing that is rarely mentioned, however, is all the murder.
I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer
It works! I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer. I'm announcing my first cohort of six clients, and sharing some details of how the model works.
Math breakdown: Anime homing missiles
Tech Notes on Cubic Bezier Curves, Perlin Noise, and Minimal Rotation Frames