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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,219 posts.
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Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
Did you know Clarus the Dogcow is hiding in the macOS Ventura beta?
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Writing Is Hard
Writing is hard. Especially if you start thinking. Never stop to think about what to write (unless you must), it will ruin the flow. Never stop to correct yourself, to judge or run a spellcheck. Don’t do that; that’s what editing is for. I’ve read the same tips again and again: Write first, edit later. […]
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Building a web application with Rust and WebAssembly
Whether it be with React, VueJS, Angular, or in Rust, modern web applications are composed of 3 kinds of pieces: Components Pages Service Components are reusable pieces and UI elements. An input field, or a button, for example. Pages are assemblies of components. They match routes (URLs). For example, the
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Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)
The UNIX fork() system call seems like an elegant way to process tasks in parallel. It creates a copy of the current process, allowing tasks to read the same memory, without needing fine-grained synchronization. Unfortunately, you need to use it extremely carefully in large programs because fork in a multi-threaded…
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Luck Surface Area: How to Get Lucky In Life
You can't force luck. But you can increase your chances (by a lot) to get lucky. Here's how to do it with luck surface area.
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If it isn't going to work, just shut it down
Don’t build the startup ship of Theseus.
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“Downthem” DDoS-for-hire boss gets 2 years in prison
A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites.
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Human attention has become a commodity
Fake news. Misinformation. Mental health crises. Election meddling. Extremism. Partisanship. Eating Disorders. Body Dysmorphia. Vulnerability porn.
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The Floppotron 3.0
After a long time it’s time for a big upgrade of my computer hardware orchestra. Here it is! The bigger and better Floppotron 3.0. 512 floppy disk drives, 4 scanners and 16 hard disk drives.
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Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia …
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We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.
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We will never have enough software developers (2020)
Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers despite efforts to grow the number of computer science graduates and software engineers.
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How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses
Trustpilot promises to be “free and open” — in reality, they are the exact opposite, holding companies at ransom, and outright violating…
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Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq
Software engineer and writer exploring web development, productivity systems, AI, and creative projects. Sharing insights on building better tools and…
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LaMDA is not sentient
No, LaMDA is not sentient. Not even slightly.
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Finally, no bid on mortgage-backed securities
From my friend Kevin Oakley, I see this news on Twitter:
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System Preferences Reimagined on macOS
After decades without a redesign, System Preferences on macOS gets a bold & beautiful new look.
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How far behind a plane is its noise?
If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is. You can hear the loud engines, and your ears tell you it should be in one place, but your eyes tell you it’s clearly well ahead of its noise. It’s a funny visual…
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Making Code Faster
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
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Overthinking (2021)
I used to be a pathological overthinker. Everything had to be carefully planned, from the words I would say to the baker to order a baguette to all the insignificant details of any of the projects I worked on. Is it better to tweet at 18:00 or 18:05? Rust or
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Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
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Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…
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The Y Combinator in Go with generics
A few years ago I've written in some detail about the Y combinator, including implementations in Clojure and Python.
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Computers are an oppressive technology
This may seem a strange heading for someone whose career is in computers, yet I feel that this article has been a lifetime in the making. It is the product of intuitive observations and things that have stood out to me, even as a child, who even then could sense the sinister side of the most banal of technologies.