Inserting 130M SQLite rows per minute from a scripting language
The other week, I stumbled on the post Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute , which was a funny coincidence, as I was just in...
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
The other week, I stumbled on the post Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute , which was a funny coincidence, as I was just in...
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets. This started out as a feature request from Aslak Raanes: #1388: Serve using UNIX …
Gas and oil, and opium
This is the story of how all non-admin users can read the registry — and so elevate privileges and access sensitive credential information…
Computers are amazing tools and Internet is an amazing network, we can share everything we want with anyone connected. As for now, most of the Internet is neutral, meaning ISP have to give access to the Internet to their customer and don't make choices depending on the destination (like faster access for some…
In my experience as the founder and CEO of two startups I have had numerous opportunities to observe decisions being made: technical decisions about how to build products, personnel decisions about whom to hire, business decisions about how to market and sell our products, strategic decisions about company direction…
Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code…
How much Money has my first Steam game made in the first month of early access? Revenue, wishlist, sold copies Stats.
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don’t think too hard about it, just
Often, doing a little is better than doing a lot.
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I…
Further adventures in JavaScript
SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber. SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish…
Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…
Today I'd like to share some math connecting ideas from information theory, algebra, and topology. It's all in a new paper I've recently uploaded to the arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09581), which describes a correspondence between Shannon entropy and functions on topological simplices that obey a version of the…
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
Parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (EU country) were on the July 11th. We (a center-right opposition coalition) were running Facebook…
A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: …