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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
This week I finished the most recent book in my self-guided study of 20th century technology, namely The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner. As the title implies, it’s a chronicle of research and development wing of AT&T, a history that lasts...
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How the Devteam Conquered the iPhone
The summer of 2007 was an eventful one if you were into cell phones. It all started on June 29 when Apple announced the release of the iPhone. If you have never taken the time to watch the full keynote, I highly recommend it.
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E-Bikes Overtake Buggies for Some Amish (2021)
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles. In small Amish towns across America such as Sugarcreek, Ohio, Napponee…
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S3 is files, but not a filesystem
"Deep" modules, mismatched interfaces - and why SAP is so painful
2706
mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
2707
Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
How to extract raw source protobuf definitions from compiled binaries, regardless of the target architecture
2708
I'm Betting on Call-by-Push-Value
Why call-by-push-value is the best evaluation strategy, and why it's going to take over
2709
What Monks Know about Focus
It’s Never Been Easy to Battle Distraction. Reviewing Jamie Kreiner’s New Translation of John Cassian in ‘How to Focus’
2710
A helicopter and boats to perform a rare ceremony at the Tower of London
Next week, a fairly rare ceremony will take place in and around the Tower of London, and it's even more special than usual this time.
2711
Apple curl security incident 12604
tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…
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Why Tolkien Hated Dune
A short intro to the philosophy of ethics J.R.R. Tolkien maintained a very private, but very negative opinion of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In Tolkien’s Library, entry 964, Tolkien is quoted…
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Build Initramfs Rootless
Let's create an hello world init program that the kernel can execute to show that everything works correctly:
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"AI, no ads please": 4 words to wipe out $1T
Introducing a series on AI vs. ads
2717
You cannot simply publicly access private secure links, can you?
turns out, you can even search for them with powerful search engines!
2718
How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio
2719
The Berkeley Software Distribution
UNIX is always litigious
2720
Hurried Thoughts: You're Wrong About Tidal-Locking
Space Engine ...
2721
Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years
Today, Downpour comes out! In case you don't know, Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years. I started it after I left Niantic in October 2022, and I have been working on it ever since then (with breaks for illness
2722
The CAP theorem. The Bad, the Bad, & the Ugly
The CAP theorem is too simplistic and too widely misunderstood to be of much use for characterizing systems.
2723
Leadership is a hell of a drug
Last week, I received the following invitation to a compulsory on-site meeting, following management's repeated engagements with some sort of Agile shaman.
2724
Signs you're about to be acquired (2020)
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
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The art and history of lettering comics
Todd Klein's online book exploring little-known aspects of comics: lettering, letterers, logo design and more.
2726
The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
2727
The end of Airplane.dev
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
2728
Autogenerating a Book Series from Three Years of iMessages
Tired of waiting for iMessage to load my messages from years ago, I printed them all out in a set of paperback books.
2729
How to Structure C Projects: These Best Practices Worked for Me
I recently worked on two different C projects, and I wanted to structure them in a way that would make them easy to maintain and understand. I also wanted to make sure that the projects were easy to build and test. In this post, I will share my experience and the best practices I found for structuring C projects.
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