2401
A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
2402
Organizing a Group Buy of Flour
We just had a huge shift from people eating out to eating in, and now a lot more people are baking, so we and a lot of people I know have had trouble finding grocery stores with flour in stock. The residential supply chain is struggling to keep up with demand. On the other hand, the commercial supply chain is…
2403
Ruby Concurrency Final Report
Ruby's native I/O methods traditionally blocked the calling fiber, leaving event-loop libraries to provide replacement wrappers. This Ruby Concurrency Progress Report presents a lightweight per-thread Fiber Scheduler which lets those native operations cooperate with an event loop. It explains the implementation and…
2404
What Outranks Thread Priority?
This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on.The first fe…
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Using VueJS Alongside Django
Tutorial with copy-paste ready code to add CSV Export to any model in Wagtail's modeladmin module
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The Wolfram Physics Project
How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.
2410
ActivityPub Could Be the Future
You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off
2411
British Rail’s short experiment with travelling pubs
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
2412
John Conway
I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with …
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Clocking a 6502 simulator to 15GHz
6-5-0-who? The 6502 is an iconic processor that dominated home computing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was used in machines ra...
2417
Build versus Buy
A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for roughly thirty-two ascii characters in a particular…
2418
Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems
Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var , and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.
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The algebraic structure of functions, illustrated using React components
Did you know there’s an algebraic structure for functions? That may not surprise you at all. But it surprised me when I first found out about it. I knew we used functions to build algebraic structures. It never occurred to me that functions themselves might have an algebraic structure. The structure is fascinating…
2421
Remembering Conway
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
2422
Your statement is correct but misses the point
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
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NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service
AKA Anycast-Pi-hole-as-a-Service... but even better!
2425
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2426
Why Aren’t More Users More Happy With Our VMs? Part 1 (2018)
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
2427
Computers Can Be Understood
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
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Rediscovering CardDAV
I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contact...
2430
Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform
Apple and Google released a joint specification that allows both iPhones and Android devices to do contact tracing on a global scale. Even though "privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance", this is a game changing event that has grave consequences. We must stop Apple and Google in their tracks. Or…