1711
New numbers on music consumption
And it's not just the dominance of old songs—the whole creative culture is losing its ability to innovate. But why?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
1712
Building a radio-controlled submarine with automatic depth control
In this post series I will explain the making of a radio-controlled submarine. I will go through the design, the building process, Python code, tests in water, and all the mistakes I made. Lots of …
1713
1714
The high price we pay for social media
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break betwe…
1715
Bill Watterson, Picasso, and self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the…
1716
I just finished reading a book and took lots of notes. Now what?
"I just finished reading Dirt by David R. Montgomery and created a note for each of the hundred twenty one ideas I found interesting. But, I'm confused as t...
1717
We could have universal Covid vaccines soon
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
1718
Training my sense of CO2 ppm
Posted on Thursday 14 Jul 2022. 1,157 words, 9 links. By Matt Webb.
1719
Git log is not a changelog
When you maintain a project, publishing new releases can quickly become a chore, so naturally one tries to automate it as much as possible.
1720
Scratch is a big deal
While none of us were paying attention, Scratch has transformed from a programming language for kids to a massive online community of self-guided, student-pr...
1721
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
1722
1723
'Zero trust’ security is a poor choice of words
Consider the user's perspective when naming a security initiative
1724
Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of
1725
The 13-Inch MacBook Air
It’s taken decades of iterative refinement to get to this point — a nearly perfect laptop for nearly everyone.
1726
Learning The Elite Class
my experience at fancy parties
1727
Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, with Slint looking promising as well, but web-based approaches such…
1728
The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
1729
1730
10% of the top million sites are dead
Top 1 million domains? More like the top 1 million lies
1731
Scrumdog – a program to download Jira Issues to a local database
Why I created Scrumdog - a program to download Jira Issues to a local database
1732
EA: The Human Story (2004)
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
1733
How Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling worked
Parallax scrolling – creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene by having the background and foreground move at different speeds – is pretty much a staple of platformers and other 2D g…
1734
Pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS (2020)
This post describes the implementation and use of pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS.
1735
Rust on Espressif chips – 15-07-2022
Scott Mabin's blog
1736
Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…
1737
1738
How I went about learning Rust
Rust has been on my radar for a long time now , and about a year ago I finally began allocating some time every week to learning it.
1739
The Algorithm for Hard Problems: Shake and Pull Gently
(Or, “regularized greedy algorithms and their applications.”) James Gilles “Algorithm” is one of those words that sounds fancier than it really deserves. We hear all the time about the “facebook algorithm”, the “youtube algorithm”, “high frequency trading algorithms”, “artificial intelligence algorithms”, and so on…
1740
Lessons from Writing a Compiler
Collected tips from building the Austral compiler.