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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,213 posts.
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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
An interactive demonstration of the “Pigeon Neck” Illusion
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Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983
Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the Wires. The setup is that he just discovered that there’s warrant for his arrest by the California Youth Authority, and he’s trying to…
14735
Elite for Emacs (2015)
A recent discovery from old backups revealed something long forgotten: I really developed a version of Elite for…. that’s right… Emacs text editor.
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Natural language is the lazy user interface
A chatbot is the lazy user interface. It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions.
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Just know stuff (or, how to achieve success in a machine learning PhD)
Introduction So I recently completed my PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford. (Hurrah! It was so much fun.) In 2-and-a-bit years I wrote 12 papers, received 4139 GitHub stars, got 3271 Twitter followers, authored 1 textbook – doing double-duty as my thesis – and got the coveted big-tech job-offer. On…
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The Hostile Forces of Beijing
On January 16th the friends of Cao Zhixin, a 27 year old book editor residing in Beijing, posted a video of Cao onto Youtube. The video spread quickly spread across Chinese language Twitter, and fr…
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Forking Chrome to render in a terminal
I wrote about forking Chrome to turn HTML to SVG two months ago, today we're going to do something similar by making it render into a terminal.
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Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
You've been visited by St. Ignucious. Upvote for success in FOSS
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SirTunnel, a personal ngrok alternative
From time to time I need to expose a development web site or web service to the world. In the past, I’ve used ngrok for that, and of course long ago I built ReverseHTTP which is somewhere in the same ballpark, but I recently got fed up with the state of affairs and decided to see whether there was something simple I…
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Omega-3s: Are “Brain-Boosting” Effects Scientifically Backed?
No, but they’re probably good for you.
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Take more screenshots (2022)
If you do any sort of creative digital work, screenshots and screen recordings are a great way to remember it.
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Contracts you should never sign
There are types of contracts that you should be wary of signing, particularly in the software engineering and IT industry. There are potential pitfalls of non-compete clauses, confidentiality agreements, exclusive distribution agreements, and vague project-based agreements. It's important to understand the…
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The continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings
“The computer has long been a solution looking for problems—the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems.” – Joseph Weizenbaum (1983) Trying to kee…
14746
ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
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The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
My personal website and blog
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Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
Of the biggest tech companies, only Apple has not executed major job cuts. But why is this, and can we now expect it to follow suit by shedding workers?
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Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
Yet commentators and politicians keep missing it
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Grokking big unfamiliar codebases
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
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France's largest semiconductor company got nationalized in plain sight (2022)
A power struggle was actually China encroaching on France's Largest Company. France decided to nationalize instead.
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Resilience and Waste in Software Teams
Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smo…
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Thoughts on what a next Rust compiler would do
In Rust in 2023, @nrc floated an idea of a Rust compiler rewrite. As my hobby is writing Rust compiler frontends (1, 2), I have some (but not very many) thoughts here! The post consists of two parts, covering organizational and technical aspects.
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How a CPU works: Bare metal C on my RISC-V toy CPU
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
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Surviving without a superuser in Postgres 16
As I've written about before , a PostgreSQL superuser always has the ability to take over the operating system account in which PostgreSQL i...
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CamelCase vs. underscores revisited (2013)
It has been 2 years since I published “CamelCase vs underscores: Scientific showdown”, and it still is easily the most visited article on this blog. Yesterday alone it got 2,614 views t…
14758
I almost bought a scanner
I almost bought a scanner. Mainly for my Alpine Panoramics project . The key here is that I am still shooting most of these photos on a Hasselblad Xpan - a long since discontinued film camera that shoots two 35mm frames side by side to achieve a panoramic frame covering approximately 65x24mm.
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Designing my own ASIC with tiny tapeout
First, what is an ASIC? An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit which basically means that it is an Integrated Circuit on a single piece of silicon and its use is limited to a particu…
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