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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,895 posts.
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Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order…
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Whatever happened to Channel 1?
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems
For quite some time now I’ve been trying to learn about distributed systems, and it’s appropriate to say that once you start digging, there seems to be no end to it, the rabbit hole goes on and on. The literature in distributed systems is quite extensive, with lots of papers coming from different universities, plus…
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Swift open source – let the revolution begin
It has only been a few days since the announcement of Swift going open source and the activity around the project has been incredible. When Apple revealed th...
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I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
Take a walk with Stephen Wolfram through the topics in his new book that introduces non-programmers to the Wolfram Language and computational thinking.
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Choosing an HTTP Status Code
What could be simpler than returning HTTP status codes? Did the page render? Great, return 200. Does the page not exist? That’s a 404. Do I...
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When Undercover Credit Card Buys Go Bad
I recently heard from a source in law enforcement who had a peculiar problem. The source investigates cybercrime, and he was reaching out for advice after trying but failing to conduct undercover buys of stolen credit cards from a well-known underground card market. Turns out, the cybercrime bazaar’s own security…
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Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405
Twitter users @SadHappyAmazing and @HistoricalPics posted yesterday two photographs (copy) showing the Raspberry Pi Zero juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building, where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957. Here is how the two computers compare.
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The convergence of compilers, build systems and package managers
Abstract. The traditional abstraction barriers between compiler, build system and package manager are increasingly ill-suited for IDEs, parallel build systems, and modern source code organization. Recent compilers like go and rustc are equipped with a fully-fledged build systems; semantic build systems like Bazel and…
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A magic getopt
Enter magic getopt . Via a little bit of macro magic, the above options-handling code turns into this:
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Market Rate is for Lobsters
Ernie Miller is a values-driven engineering leader, conference speaker, and lover of people based in Naples, Florida.
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Why I'm Excited About Native CSS Variables
A few weeks ago CSS variables—more accurately known as CSS Custom Properties—shipped in Chrome Canary behind the Experimental Web Platform Features flag.[1] When Chrome engineer Addy Osmani first tweeted about the release, he was met with a surprising amount of negativity, hostility, and skepticism. At least, it was…
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Building the Tamagotchi Singularity
I also gave a talk about this project on the Hackaday Superconference 2015. There is a video available of that if you'd rather watch me talk. You can also directly view the end result if you so please.
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Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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Avoiding Reflection (And Such) in Go
So, as previous posts show , I like Go well enough. But as a computer-language polyglot, "Go programmer" is not part of my identity, and I try for a balanced view. It is very human to go overboard in both praise and criticism, both easy to find online.
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Unexplored Areas in Data Compression
A good colleague of mine, Rich Geldreich put up a interesting article talking about his viewpoints in future directions in lossless…
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I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook
DeLorean DMC-12
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