21001
How Not to Redact a Warhead
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,240 posts.
21002
The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
21003
Best practices around creating production ready web apps with Docker Compose
Here's a few patterns I've picked up based on using Docker since 2014. I've extracted these from doing a bunch of freelance work.
21004
Apple, FedEx and the cookie apocalypse
As cookie-based ads go away, does the targeting move from the cloud to the client, or from the reader to the content? Does this make the strong stronger? Or does the money go to Fedex instead?
21005
Making $100k as an Employee versus Being Self-Employed
<p>I’ve been self-employed for 2 years now. I love it and want to encourage others to go for it, but first, I need to answer a question as f...
21006
21007
Avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods (2014)
Let's focus on a factor that puts even more extreme limits on home ownership - HOAs. And more specifically why you should avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods.
21008
On Smoking
Essay 17
21009
The most expensive number in engineering
How to put a price on the limits of knowledge
21010
A Macro View of Nanite
After showing an impressive demo last year and unleashing recently with the UE5 preview, Nanite is all the rage these days. I just had to go in and have some fun trying to figure it out and explain…
21011
21012
Donating my time to grow a VC-funded company: why I quit mentoring at Plato
tl;dr Nonprofit/pro bono organizations I suggest for offering mentoring/seeking mentorship: Mentoring Club [https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/software-engineering] (experienced mentors, EU focus), Coding Coach [https://codingcoach.io/] (aimed at software engineers), Mentors in Tech…
21013
PostGIS at 20, the Beginning
Twenty years ago today, the first email on the postgis users mailing list (at that time hosted on yahoogroups.com) was sent, announcing the first numbered release of PostGIS. The early history of PostGIS was tightly bound to a consulting company I had started a few years prior, Refractions Research. My first contracts…
21014
Google’s new popup will further weaken Facebook’s advertisement business
Android 12’s privacy-focused permission deepens the woes of Facebook by vowing to end invasive location-targeted marketing
21015
You Don't Need to Rebuild Your Development Docker Image on Every Code Change
You can mount code from your development machine into a container and save yourself tedious waiting times during development.
21016
The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen
The Internet King on why the Internet is a force for good, on media conformity, the inevitable triumph of the WEIRD, Crypto, Retards, etc.
21017
21018
A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
21019
Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
21020
The New York Times uses the dark patterns it derides
New York Times op-ed recently decried tricks websites use to manipulate users… but have you ever tried to cancel your NY Times subscription?
21021
Overkill objects for everyday life
I routinely make a fool of myself when I tell friends I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room. Of course, with the pyrotechnic charge removed. Seriously, I would totally buy it if it weren't $5,000 on eBay and I've got
21022
Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’
A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of 'free shipping' that is anything but free.
21023
Please commit more blatant academic fraud
This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant...
21024
“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
21025
21026
My Personal Creed of Employment
After taking a sabbatical, a time I was very fortunate to spend with my family and children, I was preparing to return to work. As I walked in the park a day before I wrote these thoughts, wanting to capture the perspective I had gained during the recent months. This is a collection of thoughts I had at the time, I…
21027
Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions
Fake, positive reviews have infiltrated nearly every corner of life online these days, confusing consumers while offering an unwelcome advantage to fraudsters and sub-par products everywhere. Happily, identifying and tracking these fake reviewer accounts is often the easiest way to spot scams. Here’s the story of how…
21028
Book Review: Double Fold
Finalist #6 of the book review contest
21029
A writing tip I learned at Oxford
No, this is not an essay about commas
21030
Finding CSV files that start with a BOM using ripgrep
For sqlite-utils issue 250 I needed to locate some test CSV files that start with a UTF-8 BOM.