20401
Where are the robotic bricklayers?
When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,239 posts.
20402
Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
20403
This Can’t Go On
The long view of economic history says we're in the midst of a huge, unsustainable acceleration. What happens next?
20404
Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
20405
SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…
20406
Bombs vs. Bugs
I’ll be taking some time in the next months to talk about the newly hostile-by-default nature of technology, and how I deal with it.
20407
Emacs' org-mode gets citation support
Introducing citations!
20408
Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux
In this post I discuss how you can upgrade a NAS Server by adding Thunderbolt 3 for lightning fast connectivity at 20 or 40Gbps. This particular implementation is specific to an Apple Mac Mini M1 and
20409
Leap seconds: Causing bugs even when they don’t happen
Some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can
20410
Full-time open source with Andrew Kelley
Today’s show: How to quit your job and work on open source full time. This story has it all -- balancing side projects and full-time employment, building up enough supports to leave your job, and explaining quitting to your family and friends. And also: what do you do if your project succeeds, and then someone forks…
20411
A Bestiary of Functions for Systems Designers
Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
20412
Computational algebraic geometry for high school students
Can high school students really learn algebraic geometry? And what could it teach us about mathematics education?
20413
20414
How to boost your popularity on OkCupid using CSRF and a JSON type confusion
This is a quick blog post about a security vulnerability (now fixed) that allowed me to make anyone like or message a profile on okcupid.com simply by getting them to click a link on my website. In doing so, I used one of the most boring web application security issues (CSRF) combined with a somewhat interesting JSON…
20415
Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…
20416
Life before smartphones (2020)
An essay about life pre-iPhone addiction, why you're wrong about Salt Bae, an Indian butter chicken Instant Pot adventure, and a new Hell & Wellness pod discussing Marie Kondo.
20417
Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
20418
Why is China smashing its tech industry?
Maybe because what countries think of as a "tech industry" isn't always the same
20419
Back to Linux
Background Note: I’ve started writing this article about one year ago (September 2020), but I dropped it at some point. Its final version is way less ambitious than my original plans for it, mostly because I forgot some of things that were on mind back then. Still, better than nothing. A long time ago (in 2011) I…
20420
20421
Beautiful ideas in programming: generators and continuations
Science, programming, books, and other interesting stuff
20422
How to write slow Rust code
I have recently published a blog post that, as I had expected (actually, hoped for, as that would attract people to contribute to the “study”), generated quite some polemic on the Internet!
20423
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
The mental minefield of capex and opex
20424
20425
20426
Scanning your iPhone for Pegasus
Scan your iPhone for NSO Group's Pegasus malware using Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) by Amnesty International
20427
Extracting Objects Recursively with Jq
The Algolia-powered Hacker News API returns nested comment threads that look like this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108
20428
How to summon and sell your soul to Satan and other devils
Selling your soul has never been easier. Today, there are plenty of demonology books that teach you how to bargain with Lucifer, written by authors who have probably done this themselves on multiple occasions.
20429
Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things into namespaces
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…
20430
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
Way back in 2013, I started mammoth.js , a library that converts Word documents into HTML. It's not a large project - roughly 3,000 lines - nor is it particularly exciting.