21361
.NET for Beginners (2020)
Programming, Coffee and Indie Hacking
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,241 posts.
21362
Reading the AGPL
a guided introduction for first-timers
21363
Bug in Notepad Involving Asterisk in Title Bar
Back in May 27, 2020 Microsoft published a blog post describing a new feature in Notepad:
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Remote Code Execution Found in CocoaPods
tl;dr CocoaPods is a popular package manager used by lots of iOS apps (among other Swift and Objective-C Cocoa applications). I found a remote code execution...
21365
Software designers, not engineers: An interview from alternative universe
How very different the world of software is in an alternative universe which has software designers rather than software engineers? In this interview, we look at a range of topics from software design sketching to software designer education, as well as the way in which software designers reshape any problem they are…
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Spotify is killing the open podcast ecosystem (2020)
Earlier this year, when Spotify announced that “The Joe Rogan Experience” would stream exclusively on Spotify, it sent shockwaves throughout the podcast ecosystem. This deal – reportedly worth over $100 million – is one of the most lucrative podcast deals. The presence of this deal, let alone the magnitude, is rare…
21368
Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
Erik Bernhardsson
21369
The “Granny Knot”
Many people are tying a “Granny Knot”, which sits crooked and comes loose. Learn the “one simple trick” for keeping your shoes neatly and securely tied.
21370
Zenreader: A 4.7" E-Ink RSS Reader
I have been long wanting a PDA of sorts with an E-Ink screen that allows me to read stuff on the Internet without eye strains. But the Kindle really sucks as a newsreader device because the experimental browser never works correctly.
21371
PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
21372
Prions
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
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What's in the Box?
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week: …or we could just box it. There’s two remarkable things about this sentence. The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and in...
21375
Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars
How to turn 256 bits of entropy into a beautiful, avatar-friendly circular SVG: the Hashvatar.
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Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering
Once upon a time we were creatures in the wilderness and we evolved the ability to hear sounds. Now here's an interesting thing, if you hear a sound of frequency f and others of frequency 2f, 3f, etc then there's a good chance these sounds come from the same object, due to the physical principle of resonance . And so…
21378
Why Specifications Don't Compose
Recently my friend Lars Hupel and I had a discussion on why formal methods don’t compose well. You can read the conversation here. We focused mostly on composing formally-verified code. I want to talk a little more about the difficulties in composing specifications. This is half because it’s difficult for interesting…
21379
Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python
A basic introduction to Western music theory using the Python programming language to derive scales, chords, and modes in every key.
21380
Curl those funny IPv4 addresses
Everyone knows that on most systems you can specify IPv4 addresses just 4 decimal numbers separated with periods (dots). Example: 192.168.0.1 Useful when you for example want to ping your local wifi router and similar. "ping 192.168.0.1" Other bases The IPv4 string is usually parsed by the inet_addr() function or at…
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MirkoPC – a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered computer made in Poland
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…
21383
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part III
After a few weeks of investigating the Apple M1 GPU in January, I was able to draw a triangle with my own open source code . Although I began dissecting the instruction set, the shaders there were specified as machine code. A real graphics driver needs a compiler from high-level shading languages (GLSL or Metal) to a…
21384
Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges
Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…
21385
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
Finalist #3 of the book review contest
21386
Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh
I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad...
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Product-focused and sales-focused companies
Every company has a focus, and for most it's either sales or product. Here's why both are the wrong focal points
21388
Reducing Rust Incremental Compilation Times on macOS
How I reduced Rust incremental debug build times on macOS from 14 seconds down to 4 seconds.
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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
A corporate tale of greed, desperation, and the power of expectations. And a little bit about Capacitors.