The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
Every few months, it seems a new post decrying the use of markdown for documentation (or other things) rises to the top of Hacker News. There are often good reasons for preferring a more structured option, like reStructuredText, LaTeX, or Asciidoc. Especially in projects where more formal text is required, or where…
Please don't write your documentation in Markdown. Please. I'm begging you. Markdown is tolerable for short documentation, like a readme.md. Past that, it's...
Compaq’s descent from a company of action to a brand is a frightening parable for the the West’s focus on talk over action.
Cronopete is a Linux clone of Time Machine, the backup utility for Mac from Apple. It aims to mimic it as closely as possible.
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
Working on many projects across multiple identities can be difficult to manage. This is a procedure for leveraging git aliases to set an identity at the project level.
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
Most schools teach number systems the same way. First they teach natural numbers (or “counting numbers”), then integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers, in that order. Rationals are countable and reals are not, but that’s okay. Once you start taking roots, you need a number system more powerful than a countable…
This article walks through the technical and cultural reasons why Facebook is not in the cloud business, and whether it will be in the future.
I really like Secure by Design. The key idea is that there is a big overlap between secure code and good software design. Code that is strict, clear and focused will be easier to reason about, and …
It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
Welcome, child! Come in, come in! I have so few visitors to this little hut. Pull up a chair, and I’ll put on some tea.
If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static.
In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic.
MAJOR EDIT: 9-6-2020: New nutrition info. Per Essential Amino Acid Research, Females eat 3-5 eggs/day, males up to 7 eggs per day. For Essential Fatty Acids EPA and DHA Take Fish Oil. If you are a believer in phytochemicals/Flavonoids, feel free to eat those in addition to the base $1.50/day recipes.
No Newsletter Next Week I'll be on vacation in the Caribbean, sipping drinks and juggling for Hermit crabs. The Actual Thing I'm a vim user. I've used Vim...
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent's medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address…
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial, and you would like to learn some more by studying other people's source…
Klein - Realtime Projective Geometric Algebra
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...
Vocabulary is a tool for creating and categorising mental models. Here’s how it works and how to leverage it.
