2611
Books Become Games
Simulation, Gamification, and the Rise of Algorithmic Capitalism
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
2612
Turning scrap copper into beautiful crystals
To grow copper acetate crystals, first prepare a saturated solution by reacting 10 g of scrap copper with 400 mL of white vinegar.
2613
In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
2614
The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband
I love Longmont’s municipal broadband, but we had to fight Comcast every step of the way to get it.
2615
You probably don’t need AWS and are better off without it
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
2616
Things I would like to see in a computer algebra system
If I were to design a computer algebra system (CAS) from scratch today, I would try to achieve the following goals. Several ideas have already been implemented in one system or another, but certainly not all at once. Some ideas could be adopted by existing CASes; others would require fundamentally different designs or…
2617
Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
2618
The swimming of a dead fish (2018)
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, h
2619
On anti-crypto toxicity
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose crypto.
2620
Home lab beginners guide (2021)
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
2621
Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)
Just stop, y’all. It’s a waste of your time and your effort. Put down your Google search for an email regular expression, take a step back, and breathe.
2622
Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
2623
Can you be sure to clear a line at Tetris?
Summary: it is possible to play Tetris and guarantee that you will score at least one line, no matter which pieces are given to you, i.e., even assuming they are chosen adversarially.
2624
Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
2625
Everyone gets numbers wrong, even the New York Times
It's a shortcut to understanding, and there are no shortcuts
2626
Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone. Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take the watermark listening test. Update, January 14, 2015: Check out the results of the listening test. A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns…
2627
Debian and firmware
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
2628
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
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Take the pain out of Git conflict resolution: use diff3 (2017)
Hating git conflicts? Use git's built-in diff3 option to make sense out of it all!
2632
Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs. NixOS
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
2633
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers actually want
2634
Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2635
Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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On leaving Turkey (2021)
Painless, quick delivery of your domain name. Fast and professional service.
2638
M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
2639
Exponentially Better Rotations
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
2640
The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…