19591
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,235 posts.
19592
Pentium on a 386 Motherboard
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…
19593
Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
The papers over the next few weeks will be from (or related to) research from VLDB 2021 - on the horizon is one of my favorite systems conferences SOSP . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you…
19594
Heroes of Might and Magic V – Hammers of Bait and Switch
This documents my process of finding a fix for the “Original game not found” problem when installing Heroes of Might and Magic V: Hammers of Fate from Ubisoft. For the actual fix, pleas…
19595
19596
3½ years on my custom emperor mattress – a retrospective
I made a 7'x7' mattress that I've been sleeping on since mid 2018. It's October 2021 now, so I've been sleeping in it for about three and a half years. This retrospective will cover my findings from worst to best:
19597
An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
19598
Unusual Locomotives
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
19599
Financial innovations brought by technology
Tech firms and financial institutions, working together, have in the recent past made core financial services much better for consumers.
19600
Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust
Updated: 2023-01-06 About a year ago I was bitten by the PL bug. It started with reading Crafting Interpreters and discovering the wonders hidden under the hood of a compiler. I am also been a big fan of Emacs, and this started to get me interested in how its interpreter works. At the same time, I was reading the Rust…
19601
Meta
Facebook’s reorganization into Meta is the ultimate bet on the power of founder control.
19602
Explaining Ruby Fibers
Explaining Ruby Fibers - Noteflakes
19603
Firefox on Unix is moving away from X11-based remote control
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…
19604
How I motivate myself to write
Since leaving Uber a year ago, in October 2020, I've been making a living from writing - one with comparable income [https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1449075825329020932] to when I was employed. None of this would have happened if I did not start to write this blog several years ago.
19605
Seemingly impossible functional programs (2007)
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
19606
Animated guide to Symex: Emacs structural editing with Lisp
[This is about Symex.el , the Emacs extension for structural editing with Lisp. If you are unfamiliar with Symex, you could read the post introducing it , or TL;DR: just know that “symex” is short for Lisp symbolic expression / S-expression, and this extension provides a full-featured modal interface / Evil state for…
19607
19608
The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
19609
An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to Understand what happened.Make sure everyone knows it ha…
19610
Starship is still not understood
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
19611
The HTML video element needs to go back on the drawing board
The HTML standard doesn’t provide web authors the tools required to embed small video files in a screen and bandwidth responsive way. This needs to change.
19612
Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad
The Macbook Pro M1 is the software development laptop of choice yet I love my iPad considerably more. I'm all in with my thin client for hipsters. Here’s what I’ve learned over the months and how my baremetal homelab in the sky is setup.
19613
Open-Source Contributors Worth Sponsoring
A curated list of underappreciated open-source creators worth sponsoring on GitHub — maintainers whose libraries quietly power the JavaScript ecosystem.
19614
Software Architecture Patterns: 5 minute read
Main software architecture patterns in a nutshell.
19615
First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W has just been released, it's now got three more cores just like the RPi 3, but what is it good for and should you get one?
19616
Open secrets about Hacker News
I spent a few days examining the mechanics of Hacker News (HN) and I discovered some open secrets. “Open” because they’re not private. …
19617
Your code displays Japanese wrong
A static site to link people to when their code is displaying Japanese wrong.
19618
So you want to write a technical book
If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular…
19619
19620
Non-Transitive Dice
We describe a set of very unusual dice, and a two player game where you will always have the advantage. You can even teach your opponent how the game works, yet still win again! Finally, we will describe a new game for three players where you can expect to beat both players at the same time! Watch James Grime and…