The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,218 posts.
Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. To celebrate that this turned out to be completely false, here are some assorted reflections as a 40-year-old programmer that looks back: • Compared to my…
Looking back, and forward
Two years ago, I started out building a new software product. From the start, it would require mobile, web, and backend components to make it work, so I had to make quite a few technology choices. Here is how those turned out.
A mysterious voice is moaning and grunting on American Airlines' in-flight announcement systems, and nobody knows who or how they're doing it.
Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today. Endless poorly documented sockopts, unexpected changes in write semantics across FSs and OSes, good luck trying to figure out mtimes . But despite the mess, I can generally wrap my head around open/read/write/close. I can strace a binary and figure…
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
Introducing Ezno and the current state of the project.
I wondered how GPT-3 might do on the following problem: given a partially-connected graph, find a path between two nodes, or determine that no path exists. I wrote some code to automate generating …
Last week my mother died. After we put her urn into the ground next to my father’s we went back to their flat to talk about next steps and dividing up their belongings amongst us three children. One thing I immediately called dibs on were my father’s two books.
In deciphering the global polycrisis it can be helpful to break down the interplay of crisis dynamics into regional systems.
This is an opinionated, “quick-start” guide to using passkeys as a web developer. It’s hopefully broadly applicable, but one size will never fit all authentication needs and this guide ignores everything that’s optional. So take it as a worked example, but not as gospel.
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
I’ve been thinking about what “Rust 2024” will look like lately. I don’t really mean the edition itself — but more like, what will Rust feel like after we’ve finished up the next few years of work? I think the answer is that Rust 2024 is going to be the year of “everywhere”. Let me explain what I mean. Up until now…
The eventful tale of me getting fed up with my homework
My fascination with PCMCIA cards was created out of “necessity”. Most of my retro computing interest revolves around networking, and I wanted something that could natively attach to modern Wifi networks without the need to maintain an old linksys router just for my retro computers. There are many ways to do this, I…
I interviewed Toby Young about this ironic and shocking case of censorship.
I was cruising through the supermarket when a shopping-cart traffic jam stalled me in front of the “newsstand”. That word is in quotes because most things on offer aren’t news and in fact aren’t magazines in the traditional sense, but single-issue glossies about Princess Diana or Bruce Springsteen or Michelle Obama or…
Learn how to use your Canon EOS camera as a webcam on Debian Linux with secure boot enabled. Step-by-step guide for installing dependencies, signing the v4l2loopback module, and using the camera in applications. Works with many camera brands including Canon, Fuji, HP, Kodak, Nikon, Pentax, Sanyo, and Sony.
A Florida teenager who served as a lackey for a cybercriminal group that specializes in cryptocurrency thefts was beaten and kidnapped last week by a rival cybercrime gang. The teen’s captives held guns to his head while forcing him to record a video message pleading with his crew to fork over a $200,000 ransom in…
About halfway through Laura Vanderkam’s sharp new productivity guide, Tranquility by Tuesday, we’re introduced to Elizabeth, an education professor who, worried about her ticking tenure ... Read more
Homebrew experiences on entitled behaviour in open source, why boundaries matter for maintainers, and definitions for users, contributors and maintainers.
