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An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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How the JVM compares strings on x86 using pcmpestri
We’ve all probably seen Java’s String comparison function before. It compares strings by the first differing character, falling back to the length difference when they are identical up to the end of the shorter string:
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Typesafe Neural Networks in Haskell with Dependent Types
It seems these days like programming with dependent types in Haskell (and its advantages) is moving slowly but steadily to the mainstream of Haskell programming. In the current state of Haskell education, dependent types are often considered topics for “advanced” Haskell users. However, I can foresee a day where the…
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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Homotopy Type Theory and Higher Inductive Types
In this article, we explore the possibilities allowed by higher inductive types. They enable a much more intuitive formalization of integers and new mind-blowing definitions of the (homotopical) ci…
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Magic Leap House of Cards – FSD, Waveguides, and Focus Planes
FSD, Waveguides, and Focus/Depth Planes – A Fatally Flawed Foundation While you can’t find what Magic Leap hypes as “photonic light field chip” anywhere in their patent appl…
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Full-Text Search in Django with PostgreSQL
Article based on my talk about Full-text search in Django with PostgreSQL.
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
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Modern Linux in an ancient PC
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
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Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash
Recently I wanted to deepen my understanding of bash by researching as much of it as possible. Because I felt bash is an often-used (and under-understood) technology, I ended up writing a book on it .
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A Love Letter to Plain Text
I have used Hugo, the blog engine this blog runs on top of, more and more lately for less and less typical use cases. Hopefully this post will inspire others in similar ways.
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The State of Vacuum in Postgres
In a recent blog post , I talked about why every system that implements MVCC needs some scheme for removing old row versions, and how VACUUM...
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Products Over Projects
Projects are a popular way of organizing software efforts, but long-running product teams are often superior
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Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc in 2017
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2017. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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Algorithm efficiency comes from problem information
This is a high level post about algorithms (especially mathematical, scientific, and data analysis algorithms) which I hope can help people who are not researchers or numerical software developers better understand how to choose and evaluate algorithms. When scientists and programmers think about efficiency of…
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Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system
We've been archiving a bunch of old Xerox Alto disk packs from the 1970s. A few of them turned out to be password-protected, so I needed ...
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XPS 13 developer edition 7th generation available
-> Updated June 22, 2018 – Three 16GB/FHD configs added to the line up in the US -> Updated Jan 26, 2018 – Added list of countries that offer the XPS 13 developer edition offline.…
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Docker for data scientists: Introduction and use cases
Data scientists looking to learn Docker can get a brief intro and a look at how to improve your workflow
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Why things might have taken so long
I asked why humanity took so long to do anything at the start, and the Internet gave me its thoughts. Here is my expanded list of hypotheses, summarizing from comments on the post, here, and here. …
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What I learned in 2017 writing Go
A little over a year ago, I joined Cloud Foundry to work on Loggregator , Cloud Foundry's application logging component. Its core concern is best-effort log delivery without pushing back on upstream writers. Loggregator is written entirely in Go.
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The ‘app’ you can’t trash: how SIP is broken in High Sierra
When you can’t remove an app which you installed just a few minutes ago, you know there’s something wrong. Here’s the solution, and why this is bad security.