17731
Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,221 posts.
17732
Can you be sure to clear a line at Tetris?
Summary: it is possible to play Tetris and guarantee that you will score at least one line, no matter which pieces are given to you, i.e., even assuming they are chosen adversarially.
17733
Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
17734
Everyone gets numbers wrong, even the New York Times
It's a shortcut to understanding, and there are no shortcuts
17735
Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone. Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take the watermark listening test. Update, January 14, 2015: Check out the results of the listening test. A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns…
17736
Debian and firmware
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
17737
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
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Take the pain out of Git conflict resolution: use diff3 (2017)
Hating git conflicts? Use git's built-in diff3 option to make sense out of it all!
17741
Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs. NixOS
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
17742
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers actually want
17743
Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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On leaving Turkey (2021)
Painless, quick delivery of your domain name. Fast and professional service.
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M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
17748
Exponentially Better Rotations
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
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The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
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The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
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The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo...
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Rewriting Sysctl(8) in Rust: Systeroid
sysctl is a simple and great tool for modifying the kernel parameters. It does its job very well by providing an easy-to-use interface for /proc/sys. It is maintained as a part of procps toolkit for years and it can easily be considered a legacy tool today. So why not push it to its limits and turn it into a more…
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Don't build useless features
One of the most important core product management skills is the ability to triage unsuccessful products and avoid spending unnecessary effort on products that are destined to be losers.
17757
Vampire Attack Twitter
Here’s a simple way to take over Twitter for way less than $43 billion dollars.
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Notable items missing from English Wikipedia
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
17760
Using SBCL Common Lisp as a Dynamic Library
Have you ever wanted to call into your Lisp library from C? Have you ever written your nice scientific application in Lisp, only to be requ...