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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
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The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a […]
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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
Let engineers learn cloud without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
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On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness
My father’s father was by all accounts a really bitter-hearted sort of person.
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Branchless Coding in Go
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
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Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
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An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
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Chiptunes on an ATtiny4 and the 3 Cent Micro
Ever since hearing about Rob Miles' Bitshift Variations in C Minor , a 4-voice polyphonic 16 minute piece of algorithmically generated music, I wanted to implement it in hardware. Getting it onto just any microcontroller seemed too easy , so I wanted it to run on the smallest µC I could find — the ATtiny4. A while…
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Efficiency Is the Enemy
If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
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So you want to build a carbon capture company
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
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Why I’ll never create modules for VCV Rack anymore–and what I’ll make instead
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
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Building video chat into my personal website using WebRTC, WebSockets, and Go
Recently I've become more and more interested in how WebRTC works, so a few weeks ago I decided to add a page to my website where I could set up peer-to-peer video chats. There are plenty of libraries and services out there to make this extremely easy, but knowing that WebRTC is now well supported natively across…
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The Unix Magic Poster
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
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Nicholas Wade: Origin of Covid – Following the Clues
“” is published by Nicholas Wade.
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Practical SQL for Data Analysis
What you can do without Pandas
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Programming in Z3 by learning to think like a compiler
Programming in logic can help you produce better optimized, more secure, bug-free code … if only you knew how to do it.
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The art of solving problems with Monte Carlo simulations
Using the power of randomness to answer scientific questions.
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The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think
The multi-skin toned handshake emoji reveals that it is more than a routine gesture
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My Favorite One Liners
My favorite Linux command-line one-liners: turn shell output into an image, find your biggest directories, list your most-used commands, serve files over HTTP.
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Competitive Analysis for Engineers
In my experience, most professional software engineers in industry have little to no experience doing competitive analysis. That’s a shame, because competitive analysis is one of the most useful skills that an engineer can have.
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Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
I think the Rust language is a big success. When I think back on it I am in awe: so much had to go right to get where we are, and there were so many opportunities to go wrong. It took many tiny miracles for the Rust language to become what it has. Those miracles didn’t happen by accident though: each one was created…
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Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
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Why are there so many Canadians in India?
Any time India comes up in the context of Firefox and Data I know it’s going to be an interesting day. They’re our largest Beta population: They’re our second-largest English user…
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part IV
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU , the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run…
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Progress Delayed is Progress Denied (Safari feature lag)
Apple's iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in the delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store. This is a bold assertion, and proving it requires examining the record from multiple directions.
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The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007)
Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken…
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One Year of TILs
Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format! TIL stands for …