The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found it so useful I wrote a free online guide to help others learn it. Then I decided the guide wasn’t good enough and wrote Practical TLA+ in 2018. Then I decided the…
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
We all know that to create an interactive front end for your website you need JavaScript. Not just vanilla JS, mind: we're in 2022, and to create an…
The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky , the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted…
I'll show you what good logging is with real-life examples. Most people don't know what to log, so they end up creating just noise....
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
A deep dive into the Feynman Technique, a method designed to learn through teaching. How can we upgrade it with a few teaching principles?
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
Apparently, the first system breakdown of a driverless robot taxi fleet occurred. In San Francisco, at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the i…
Message signaled interrupts or MSIs describe a way to signal an interrupt without a dedicated interrupt request pin (IRQ). One of the most prevalent uses for MSIs is the PCI bus, and the PCI specification defines the MSI and MSI-X standards. The potential benefits may include: (1) reduced number of direct wires from…
It's can't just be an excuse — we need to improve our policies
Yes, *that* kind of microphone -- the kind that are most commonly known to be used by employees of the military industrial complex.
In my never ending quest to have oksh support every C compiler in existence, I have ported two more C compilers to OpenBSD . They are chibicc and kefir. As always, let's review them and at the end I'll have links to unofficial ports so that you can play around with these C compilers.
Substantial set of new and updated functions in Version 13.1 covers generalized listability, language conveniences, emoji computations, default toolbar, large-scale code editing, drawing in notebooks, Tree expansion, video capture, mathematics, customizable documentation, chemical quantities, machine learning…
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
Seriously. Someone did this. Because... why not?
Image Source.”Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second” –Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancien…
At the end of Part One , I found myself staring at this BMW F20 GWS ( Gangwahlschalter - gear selector switch - thanks to everyone who helped dig up the German name) that I wanted to adapt into an Electric Vehicle conversion.
That Earth-circling U.S. military X-37B robotic space drone is closing in on a new long-duration record.
In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But fir...
Also see: cold emails (with examples) Here’s how Travis Kalanick’s inbox looked like back in 2013: Source (perma) If you wanted to reach Travis — and keep in mind that at some point during the last six years he probably hit #inbox1m — would you just send him one email and hope that it wins the lottery when he randomly…
Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Future al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki also connected
Using an industry wide perspective I will show you the unseen downsides of using leetcode for interviewing software engineers
DNS servers often have to convert DNS names to their canonical lower case form. BIND has to do so a bit more than most because it tries to preserve the case of DNS names rather than canonicalizing them.
Caplan and Candor
