17851
The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020)
Six percentage of each music files you’ve bought from Apple Music (iTunes Store) contain, literally, nothing. Why is Apple padding their music with zero-bytes?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,221 posts.
17852
Money Stuff is Linear-ish
What was once a pre-market morning newsletter became an afternoon newsletter, 12 seconds at a time
17853
The underwhelming impact of software engineering research
This article was prompted by responses to a tweet I wrote in response to an analysis of the research area of papers submitted to the 2022 ICSE conference, the flagship conference for software engineering research. These led me to reflect on software engineering research in general. I’m sorry to say that I think that…
17854
Hand-optimizing the TCC code generator
I am on a number of different compiler mailing lists. One of those is the mailing list for the Tiny C Compiler . Imagine my surprise when a recent email mentioned our latest series and suggested trying a similar approach to improve the code generator in TCC. I was interested to see if there were any low-hanging fruit…
17855
We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
The Wolfram Institute will pursue opportunities in scientific research based on a new multicomputational paradigm found during a project to develop a fundamental theory of physics.
17856
A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…
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Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
I think it was due to overwhelming boredom with the RFP process that I once partnered with my sales leader to say Yes to every single requirement on every RFP bid during the summer of 2020. We called it The Summer of Yes.
17860
The Tower of Weakenings: Memory Models for Everyone
In my previous article I looked at the ways that Rust could be better at pointers. Half of the problems were fundamental issues that affect basically every programming language that lets you mess with pointers directly, and the other half were rust-specific issues. My article also proposed two solutions: for the…
17861
What’s new in Emacs 28.1?
Learn what's new in Emacs 28.1
17862
I need to stop being boring
This week, I felt pretty depressed and lost my motivation and focus. After launching Space4 , I got some signups from HackerNews , but no one was really using the app. Including myself.
17863
Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted
With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it, we’re missing a disturbing development — Twitter is using its embedded javascript to edit other people’s sites.
17864
Design of This Website (2021)
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
17865
The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems
Bill Harris points to this cartoon from Randall Munroe. I think he (Munroe) is really on to something here. Not about Bayes’s theorem but about the sorts of examples that are in textbooks.
17866
My attempted cult recruitment
Dark patterns in social behavior
17867
The next Google
DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.
17868
35mm cinema film and digital audio
A while ago I decided to pick up some 35mm cinema film to help me experiment with projection optics.
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The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
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Happy 10th Birthday, Sidekiq
It’s hard for me to believe these words but I pushed Sidekiq’s first commit on Jan 16th, 2012. Ten years ago. The public announcement. One month later. One quarter later. Some context for those new to this blog: Sidekiq is the most popular background job system for the Ruby programming language. Every application has…
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The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
Learn how to organize your digital life in seconds. Stop wasting time looking for information and gain greater focus on what matters most.
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All you need is links
When Tim Berners Lee talks about how he designed the web, he uses an analogy from physics, describing his process as a quest to find “fundamental laws” which can generate a desired system:
17876
Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game
It's a wise saying, because we game developers have so much fun making the underlying foundations, that we never get around to adding the actual gameplay.
17877
Backyard approaching lighting at Adelaide Airport
Located smack bang in the middle of South Australia’s capital city, Adelaide Airport has an interesting runway approach lighting system – located in suburban streets and residential backyards! Some background Adelaide Airport is located approximately 6 kilometres from the Adelaide CBD. With the suburbs of Brooklyn…
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Rust on Espressif chips Q1 2022
Scott Mabin's blog
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USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
17880
Are you nice or kind?
Last week Avi and I went outside to unbury our car after the storm, a task we assumed we could do ourselves but ultimately involved our whole neighborhood.