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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,223 posts.
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The Future of E-Bikes
The best feeling on a bike is cruising down a hill, barely pedaling, and taking in the surroundings. E-bikes are like that all the time. "How do you know if someone has an e-bike? They'll tell you!" goes the joke.
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Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)
I've always been curious about the story of Bell Labs – how it was formed, why it was successful, its challenges and struggles, innovation engine, people, its organizational structure, operations, and its legacy. The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is an excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary of what, how, and
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The control group is out of control (2014)
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
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Ethnographic research on Dynamicland
The “Dynamic Medium Group” led by Bret Victor which is developing “Dynamicland” is much admired and closely watched in the interaction design community. Yet the information about their work is closely-guarded and usually only available in a highly moderated form. The work of ethnographer Götz Bachmann, who spent much…
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Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
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Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world
I’m not a POWER (or recently: Power) expert, only an enthusiastic user and advocate. Still, in the past couple of weeks a number of people from around the world asked my opinion how the POWER architecture could be kept relevant. This blog is really just an opinion, as I do not have the financial means to go ahead. It…
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I'm making a Typescript type-checker in Rust
TLDR; I'm making a Typescript type-checker in Rust. Right now it supports a smaller subset of the type-system and exists as a fun side-project, but the end goal is a compilation tool we can use to make Typescript compilation go brrrr...
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On Leaving Facebook
After 8.5 years at Facebook I joined a small startup called Replit. Leaving wasn't easy, and during the process I've talked to half a dozen friends who were ...
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Off the Grid
People choose to live off-grid for self-sufficiency, resilience, or ecological reasons. For us, to live off-grid, is mostly letting go of the numbing culture of convenience and surrounding ourselves with systems we trust for long transits across the ocean. When far away from the coasts, we have to rely on our vessel…
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How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is
Texts on this and that.
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AWS is not a dumb pipe
In 1997, David Isenberg wrote an article called the Rise of the Stupid Network. Isenberg worked at Bell Labs, the R&D lab of AT&T, and was responsible for some significant breakthroughs during the PC and the early int...
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I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware dev kit from scratch
How I built a Sega Mega Drive dev kit from scratch: reverse engineering the cartridge slot, a homemade logic analyzer, a RAM cartridge and boot firmware.
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Former Labor Secretary Found What Work Is Like Now
Bill McCamley was NM's labor secretary, but working at a local movie theater taught him the truth about what's ailing the workforce.
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How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
<small>Pssst! Formatting messed up? Add ".md" to the url ✨ If you're stuck using Zoom, jump on [one](https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meet...
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My Elm Experience
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…
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WebAssembly: The New Kubernetes?
wingolog: article: webassembly: the new kubernetes?
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Ten years against division of labor in software
"Software libraries suck. Here's why, in a sentence: they promise to be abstractions, but they end up becoming services. An abstraction frees you from thinking about its internals every time you use it. A service allows you to never learn its internals. A service is not an abstraction. It isn't 'abstracting' away the…
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How will the correction in the stock market impact startup fundraising?
Analyze how the 52% public market correction impacts startup funding rounds, with data showing divergent effects on Series A vs. Series D valuations in 2022.
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The most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen (2021)
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
American Airlines has been clamping down on websites that work with AAdvantage member data for their customers. They made Award Wallet stop tracking member accounts and they sent a cease and desist letter to Red Ventures, which owns The Points Guy, over its TPG app which - among other things - lets customers track…
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Everything must be paid for twice
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
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Bad Emacs Advice
Most Emacs advice you'll find on the internet is largely good, and will improve your Emacs abilities, but people do occasionally share outright bad advice that harms your learning.
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How to grow monosodium glutamate (MSG) crystals
Dissolve MSG in water to form a saturated solution. Wait for small MSG crystals to form. Then, tie it to a string to let it grow bigger.
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Five Levels of Hype
Trying to categorize exuberance