The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
There are two types of engineers, the ones that can quickly do estimates and the ones that can’t. Are these people just smarter, or is there more to it? Enrico Fermi was a master at estimation Back of the envelope estimation is a skill that can be learned with practice. It becomes easier once you get familiar with…
I have a small collection of servers, laptops and desktops. My servers were purchased and configured at different times. By design, they have different hardware and software configurations. I have processors from AMD, Intel, Ampere and Rockchip. I have a wide range of Linux distributions, both old and new. I also…
In episode 379 of ATP both Marco Arment and John Siracusa described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to macOS 10.15.
Developer QOL When I added Lua to Garry’s Mod my intention wasn’t primarily to make things moddable. I wanted to make things eas...
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican: Here’s the SQL query that found me my …
A one-pass compiler emits assembly (or binary code) right during parsing, without creating an intermediate representation, such as an AST. This is a rare technique that was used back in the days when computer memory was scarce. This limited both the language features that were possible and the quality of the produced…
Every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.
Understanding a system or software architecture simply, truly, absolutely, undoubtedly requires an occasional sequence diagram. I left ...
People regularly go for complex test harnesses; and when you’re in an ecosystem, they can be a good fit. But outside ecosystems, it’s actually quite easy to produce a fairly good test harness.
A few months ago, after my System76 Galago Pro had its second experience with a dead/swelling batery, I decided that it was time to replace it. On February 15th, I ordered a Dell Latitude 7390.
This is a story of a convoluted, not-very-useful method for extracting codez from unwitting JavaScript developers working on top secret…
A few weeks back, I was at XDC and gave a talk about various current and past input stack developments (well, a subset thereof anyway). On...
Wikipedia's "NPOV" is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call "false balance."
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
Profound sadness is what I have experienced for most part of the last decade...
Context It’s not often I get excited about programming languages since meeting Ruby in 2015. Way before that, drowning in misery of writing university course works in Java, has pushed me away from development. Ruby’s freedom and expressiveness was what pulled me back, and its style has kept me in. I was on the lookout…
Five years ago, I wrote a post about the things I hated most about my then (and still) favorite scripting language: Ruby.
In American innovation through the ages , Jamie Powell wrote: who hasn’t finished a non-fiction book and thought “Gee, that could have bee...
I build shaders, renderers, games, and other stuff that's fun to stare at.
Investigation of the practice of port scanning site visitors for fingerprinting and tracking.
In 1987, while delivering a keynote on data abstractions and hierarchies, Barbara Liskov introduced the idea that would eventually become the Liskov Substitu...
Trying to figure out how KVM-based virtual machine hosts work by implementing one from scratch.
Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed a certain style emerge in brand and product design. Look at the graphic below and you'll see it. The colors are soft and muted, the shapes rounded and the typography unobtrusive. It’s what you could describe as clean. It’s approachable. It’s inoffensive. It’s almost… cute. Zoom…
When I build an application, I build frameworks along the way. I recently realized that not everybody thinks this is normal, so I thought I'd give a description of what I do and why I think it's a good idea.
