The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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…
What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…
There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ ALPHV “) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However…
Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.
Chronicles of training strong LLMs from scratch in the wild
Bypassing certificate pinning in Meta’s Messenger application on macOS.
It has been said that the most popular programming language in the world is the spreadsheet (and in particular these days, Excel). There...
A Celebration of Donald E Knuth
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type ( HN ) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first.
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
A few months ago, I gave a talk on CSS performance at performance.now in Amsterdam. The recording is available online: (You can also read the slides.) This is…
This blog post explores an alternative formulation of Rust’s type system that eschews lifetimes in favor of places . The TL;DR is that instead of having 'a represent a lifetime in the code, it can represent a set of loans , like shared(a.b.c) or mut(x) . If this sounds familiar, it should, it’s the basis for polonius…
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
Feeling overwhelmed? Don't know where to start? Do literally anything.
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…
Open Office Sucks
What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme? Here are some fun observations and ideas I encountered while trying to answer this question, with an attempt to apply the results in a procedural animation.
At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting…
The secrets that will make you much better at listening to a degree that your relationships are significantly more successful, peaceful, gratifying, intimate, and trusting, have to do with what you…
Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework: Today we’re launching Observable 2.0 with a bold new vision: an open-source static site generator for building fast, beautiful data apps, dashboards, and reports. Our …
AI, science, education, & ethics
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that garden is your attention. The weeds keep…
Improving the performance of a PC cooling system by writing a custom control loop in Python, and monitoring the results with Grafana.
Among a certain tech set, Kubernetes has earned a reputation as an unnecessarily complicated time-sink that startups should avoid. Using Kubernetes with a small team is seen as a sign of over-engineering.
I love hot dogs and I'm from Chicago so we knew this was coming
