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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
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Klutz Press: books built for learning stuff
Why Klutz Press books like Juggling for the Complete Klutz are the best books for learning stuff
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Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
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Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
Neurons that fire together, wire together... Ok, but how? One of my little pet projects is a neurology book for psychologists, coaches and the like. What most people in these fields imagine about the brain is somewhere between perplexing, preposterous and potentially poisonous. (Seriously, I could tell you stories...)…
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Arduino FIDO2 Authenticator
Introducing URU Card: an open-source, wallet-sized FIDO2 BLE authenticator based on ESP32, ATECC508A, OLED screen, and MPR121 touch keyboard. Join the project and start building your own secure authenticator.
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Break Up Google
It’s easy to say “Break up Big Tech companies!” Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google.
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Use Unix Pipes to Improve Chromecast Playback
When casting from YouTube to a Chromecast, sometimes the audio playback will skip and stutter. We can use VLC and Unix pipes to address this problem.
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Finishing a side project
I've struggled with some side projects and had success with others. In this post, I'll focus on the actions and adjustments that have worked for me.
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On “White Fragility”
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
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Better Geometry Through Graph Theory (2018)
A few months ago, I decided to implement set operations on curved regions. I had the the canonical textbook on computational geometry , which described approaches for polygons comprised of straight lines, and it seemed like other projects had extended these techniques to parametric curves . I figured it would take a…
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Apple’s Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View
Apple’s announcement of “Apple Silicon” is important for many reasons. Delivering on such an undertaking is the result of remarkable…
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Why Does DARPA Work?
I'm doing some reconstruction. If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link .
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Software should be designed to last
And why I am trying to minimize my dependence on external libraries (whenever possible).
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Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
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Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned
Console is the epitome of Apple’s problem with tools and support for its users, and is exactly what it needs to fix.
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Taking Up Animation as a Hobby
Whatever else happens, you made a movie... Nobody can take that away. A hundred years from now, when we're all dead and gone, people will be watching this fucking thing.
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How we got our AWS bill to around 2% of revenue
Leveraging AWS lightsail to achieve a minimal AWS bill
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GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value
I know that floating-point arithmetic is a bit crazy on modern computers. For example, floating-point numbers are not associative: 0.1+(0.2+0.3) == 0.599999999999999978 (0.1+0.2)+0.3 == 0.600000000000000089 But, at least, this is fairly consistent in my experience. You should simply not assume fancy properties like…
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The FDA's perpetual process machine
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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Using Zig to provide stack traces on kernel panic on bare metal (2018)
Last week, I reached an exciting milestone in my career as a programmer. For the first time in my life, I ran code directly on hardware , with no Operating System sitting between the bare metal and my code.
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration
Extreme refurbishing of a Commodore SX-64 keyboard. Lots of putty, epoxy resin and spray painting with original color and more :)
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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Die shrink: How Intel scaled down the 8086 processor
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
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Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…