The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
I was lucky enough to vacation in Kauai last year, one of the oldest Hawaiian islands. If you ever visit, the first thing that you’ll notice — the very first thing — is the chickens.
Suppose you have an array of floating-point numbers, and wish to sum them. You might naively think you can simply add them, e.g. in Rust:
tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to…
Or how to find the largest power of 2 that divides x?
I once worked at a company that priced everything with a .95 ending. The bestselling software package was $999.95. Add-on products were $9.95, or $19.95, or $49.95. Everything ended with a .95. It had been this way for more than twenty years. One day, one of the VPs suggested we change all prices to end […]
I apologize if this information is already known, but I couldn’t find any references about it and I wanted to understand what was going on and share with you because I think there is some value doing it. In case this wasn’t known, I apologize to the Go team for not talking to them first and jumping the full disclosure…
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html
In my off time (and my on time, for that matter) I've been working on this quirky thing I've called Scinamalink (sounds like 'skinamarink'). Scinamalink lets customers send Magic login links to their users with a single REST API call. If you don't know what a magic
I spent 2022 learning to draw and was blindsided by the rise of AI art There is lots to say about this, whether it has been or will be a good thing for artists and society in the long run. I hope to write about it in another post. models like Stable Diffusion. Suddenly, the computer was a better artist than I could…
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious…
Dissecting and symbol-mapping a camera firmware to get around WiFi hotspot mis-detection
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
Looking beyond the hype and explaining why microservices should nearly become extinct.
This is the first of two posts about a renderer I have been developing, focusing on what I've built and how it works. The second post discusses why I've built it and my plans for the future. I've been developing a custom real-time renderer which uses very small voxels to produce a distinctive visual style that…
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
A letter from Lewis Carroll to Nature, March 31, 1887: Having hit upon the following method of mentally computing the day of the week for any given date, I send it you in the hope that it may interest some of your readers. I am not a rapid computer myself, and as I find my average time for doing any such question is…
From Mario bouncing off a Goomba to two cars bumping into each other in a racing game, dealing with collisions is such an integral part of most video games that we often take it for granted.
How is tail recursion different from regular recursion? What do continuations have to do with this, what is CPS, and how do trampolines help? This article provides an introduction, with code samples in Python and Clojure.
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation…
Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history. But it may also have been badly misunderstood — in a way that now l…
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
Southwest Airlines famously doesn’t show up when searching online travel agency websites. Historically if you’ve wanted to buy a ticket on Southwest, you’ve had to go directly to Southwest to make the purchase. But desperation and new government regulations appear to be changing all of that.
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
Pavel has found a new 3-state 4-symbol Busy Beaver champion which can compute an “Ackermann-level” function and halts with exactly
"I'm a VP Engineering at a 40-person startup. My CEO (former engineer) won't let me hire engineering managers. He says we can't afford such luxuries, all hands should write code. How do I make the case for managers?"
