15421
Tailwind is a leaky abstraction
Although Tailwind does have some benefits, ultimately it’s just one more thing to learn.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,216 posts.
15422
How do transistors work, anyway?
The internet is littered with explanations of how transistors work. Most of them don't really explain anything.
15423
Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
15424
Notes on ExFAT and Reliability (2021)
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
15425
15426
A Poor Man's API
Creating a full-fledged API requires resources, both time and money. You need to think about the model, the design, the REST principles, etc., without writing a single line of code. Most of the time, you don’t know whether it’s worth it: you’d like to offer a Minimum Viable Product and iterate from there. I want to…
15427
Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results
Negative prompts can be far superior than traditional prompt additions.
15428
The Buy and Hold Mindset
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
15429
Protect me from what I want
Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out…
15430
How thick is a three-sided coin?
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
15431
Capsaicin is a psychoactive substance
Capsaicin, the active substance in chili peppers, acts on vanilloid receptors (TRPV1) and alters adrenaline and endorphine levels.
15432
Intentionally making close friends
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
15433
Everything I wish I knew when learning C
Learning C was quite difficult for me. The basics of the language itself weren’t so bad, but “programming in C” requires a lot of other kinds of knowledge which aren’t as easy to pick up on:
15434
SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow
I've been sitting on publishing these notes for a while, because I don't want to diminish the work of the talented people that engineered SwiftUI and plowed through years of AppKit and UIKit code to get to this state. But I'd like to draw attention to some performance limitations, in the hope that a SwiftUI engineer…
15435
Falsehoods programmers believe about undefined behavior
All kinds of reasonable-sounding beliefs about undefined behavior are wrong. Let's go through them.
15436
Open Source and Saying “No”
An Open Source project can balloon to extreme sizes and then lose purpose of why it started - a rant.
15437
GCC undefined behaviors are getting wild
Happy with my recent breakthrough in understanding C integer divisions after weeks of struggle, I was minding my own business having fun writing integer arithmetic code. Life was good, when suddenly… zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) .
15438
The AI war and how to win it
The battle for the future of the world
15439
Clang is better than GCC
Yes, this is a problem of weak static typing of pure C. Pure C is a great tool for some jobs, but here be dragons , as they say.
15440
Git Notes
the short of it is: they’re cool for appending notes from automated systems (like ticket or build systems) but not really for having interactive conversations with other developers (at least not yet)
15441
The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi
Not really. As a counter example, gold is clear and very old ponzi. It's ok. And as a more general argument, crypto does have utility. For circumventing capital controls, buying drugs or laundering money. So there will be constant supply of new depositors who needs that and willing to pay. I would not bet on crypto…
15442
Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming
An Introduction to Statistical Process Control.
15443
Emacs Lisp shorthands as namespacing system
In Emacs version 28 Emacs developers introduced so-called read symbol shorthands. If you’re interested in the rationale, feel free to search the Emacs developer mailing list for the discussion. However, it does seem that not everyone likes the idea of shorthands as a substitution for namespaces (or packages, if you’re…
15444
Index Merges vs. Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
Composite indexes aka multi-column indexes are about 10x faster than index merges. In Postgres, the gap is larger than in MySQL because Postgres doesn’t support index-only scans for queries that involve index merges.
15445
Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
Please. It’s an insult to my brain. Like, you put the button in one place, and then you’re like “nah, let’s move it somewhere else.” Here…
15446
CRDT: Fractional Indexing
Collaborative peer-to-peer applications sometimes need to operate on sequences of objects with a consistent order across all peers. For example, a peer-to-peer photo album application might need to sync the order in which photos appear in an album.
15447
Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and …
15448
15449
Babashka Clojure nREPL as a system interface
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
15450
WebAssembly: TinyGo vs. Rust vs. AssemblyScript
A browser sorting benchmark comparing JavaScript, Go, TinyGo, Rust, and AssemblyScript, with source code and test conditions.