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Startup childhood – Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form
Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,216 posts.
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For Want of a JOIN
Once upon a time, I was on a small team tasked with building a data pipeline. On this team was someone we’ll call Bob, who was fresh out of grad school and hadn’t had much experience with software engineering, and no experience with SQL. As part of this data pipeline, Bob had to combine the data from two tables. JOIN…
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How Apple names things
I love the way Apple names things: FireWire, App Nap, iPhone, iPod, EarPod, AirPod, AirPlay, FairPlay etc. It’s playful and there’s a lot of reuse of words and sounds. Having just finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I decided to visualize various Apple product and feature names as a network to see this reuse…
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The pocket guide to debugging
New zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging
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Avoid exception throwing in performance-sensitive code
There are various ways in software to handle error conditions. In C or Go, one returns error code. Other programming languages like C++ or Java prefer to throw exceptions. One benefit of using exceptions is that it keeps your code mostly clean since the error-handling code is often separate. It is debatable whether…
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Against All Applications
Imagining better ways of picking people
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How “See a Satellite Tonight” Works
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…
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Programming as Play
I often want to program something just for fun without any expectations. But why? Well, a recent scientific paper investigated this idea of programming as play.
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Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
During the pandemic, I deleted most of my social media accounts. While social networks started as a great way to stay in touch - the websites evolved into addic...
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We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)
The title of this post is a quote from Edward O. Wilson’s book ‘Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge’. For example, if you search for scientific papers about “Entropy” …
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Protocols, not platforms
Does everybody get to coin one maxim in their lives? If so, here’s mine: Everything gets worse. Let’s say you’re shopping at the grocery, when you notice a new food product. It competes directly with
15222
Binance caught commingling funds between US and international exchanges
Billions in customer funds transferred directly from Binance.US to offshore Binance exchange. Is this just a ploy to trick regulators?
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I still use Flash
How I Still Use Flash in 2022
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Large-format camera movements (2020)
For less than a cup of coffee, a downloadable 29-page reference guide to Large Format Camera Movements, keep it on file or conveniently on your phone
15226
This year in LLVM
Towards the end of last year, I switched from working on PHP at JetBrains, to working on LLVM at Red Hat. While it was already under discussion beforehand, this catalyzed the creation of the PHP foundation , which now pays multiple people to work on PHP. Special thanks for this go to Roman Pronskiy, who did most of…
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The recent Bank of Japan meeting and its implications for markets
Listen now | The Bank of Japan sudden change of heart has important global implications
15228
Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python
A walkthrough of 46 lines of code that render a 3D ASCII donut using signed distance functions.
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People took some potassium and lost some weight
In November 2021, we finished our series A Chemical Hunger, where we argue that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contaminants, and that one of those contaminants might be lithium…
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Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture
Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of…
15231
There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge
I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…
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Upgrading my old Chumby 8 Linux kernel
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8″ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with…
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Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip
“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…
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Boring Python: Code quality
This is the second in a series of posts I intend to write about how to build, deploy, and manage …
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“Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)
Wrong estimates aren’t your fault, but they are definitely your problem
15238
Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
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Astronomical Calculations for Hard SF in Common Lisp
Hard SF worldbuilding with the HYG database, Dijkstra's algorithm, and Lisp.
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GCC now includes Modula-2 and Rust. Do they work on OpenBSD?
Two new language frontends have been added to GCC : Modula-2 and Rust . I think this is great news on both accounts: having a Wirth language in GCC fills my childhood heart with joy (though I do wish GNU Pascal can one day be revived and mainlined, as Pascal was the first non- BASIC language I learned). And Rust…