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The Return of the 90s Web
Are we ready to revisit some of the ideas of the early web again? There are trends that suggest we might just have come full circle - and I like it.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
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Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM
In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker , mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM , a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu . What baffled me was the speed at which the virtual machine would fire up and run the service. The whole process is to be compared…
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Hash: A free, online platform for modeling
Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them.
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The Coming Chip Wars
A version of this article appeared in War on the Rocks. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The coun…
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Restoring and MIDI-Fying a Baby Grand Piano
As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no difference between the best digitally sampled pianos but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel as much alive as an actual…
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Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason
UPDATE June 18, 2020 at 10:24 PM EST: I have made contact with a human at Apple after they reached to me via Resolution Center. We are working on solving the issues, and while I have not been told “yes, your account will not be terminated”, I believe in good faith we will work something out. Yes, the issue was my…
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Gocker: Docker implemented in 1.3k lines of Go
They are popular and they are misunderstood. Containers have become the default way applications are packaged and run on servers, initially popularized by Docker. Now, Docker itself is misunderstoo…
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Covid-19: The T Cell Story
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
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A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
A non-comprehensive and opinionated guide to best monitor for programming
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A Graphical Introduction to Lattices
Here is my (extended) family tree: Everyone in the tree shares at least one common ancestor and at least one common descendant. This ...
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Apple’s Rejection of Hey from the App Store for Not Using In-App Purchases
I’m not trying to be coy, but what is the iPhone itself? A business device or a consumer product? Using *or* instead of *and* as the conjunction there is clearly laughable.
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Using Lua as a Serialization Format
This is somewhat of a followup to my post on Lua integration from a few days ago.
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Apple, ARM, and Intel
ARM Macs are imminent; why they make sense, and why the implications could be far-reaching, for not just Apple but also Intel.
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Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
What to do before adopting every little trend you come across
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Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
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AWS’s Share of Amazon’s Profit
I’ve often heard it said that AWS is a major contributor to Amazon’s profitability. How major? Here’s a graph covering the last ten quarters, with a brief methodology discussion:
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Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.