2911
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
2912
A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for talks
I love designing slides for my talks, so here are some of my not-so-secret secrets and three beginner-friendly steps for how you can up your slides game.
2913
Game Font Forensics
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
2914
An accessible one-handed keyboard, inspired by FrogPad
A couple of years ago, I was in an incident that reduced the strength in my left shoulder. I’ve been waiting for an operation to restore the function to that shoulder, but we were warned the post-operative recovery period would be several months. So I started looking for keyboard options...
2915
Programming book authors: put all the code in the book
tl;dr: programming book authors: put all the code in the book! An extreme antipattern for a programming book is “download the author’s idiosyncratic library code from some random URL an…
2916
Zed Editor: All Occurrences Search from 1s to 4ms
So zero-cost abstractions exist?
2917
Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
2918
Pimp Your Board Games
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue …
2919
Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
2920
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Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
2922
Representation Engineering: Mistral-7B on Acid
Playing around with the Representation Engineering paper, I made some interesting control vectors, and a Python package to make your own.
2923
Altman's Ambition
Sam Altman is not playing around.
2924
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Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023)
For basically as long as I can remember, I have been a staunch defender of permissive licenses over the more copyleft variety. I want you to use things I've written. On top of that I don't believe it's my place to force you to then open source things you have written that expand upon my source code. Hence my extensive…
2926
Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011)
INTRO: The output Impedance of headphone sources is one of the most common reasons the same headphones can sound different depending on wha...
2927
I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind
Why I worry about the effect GitHub Copilot is having and will continue to have on the accessibility of the web at scale.
2928
So long, and thanks for all the bytes
Goodbye Tech, Hello Future
2929
The game theory of seduction and marriage with Jane Austen
The enduring success of her early 19th century novels are in large part due to their persistent relevance
2930
Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi
Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of things can go wrong, and you need to consider how your Pi will recover from each of them.
2931
Options for genuine ECC RAM on the desktop in (early) 2024
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…
2932
From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
It's been almost 2 years since I moved to a team lead role, then to a full-time engineering management position after the expansion of our team. I've been a front-end developer for 7 years before that, and initially I took the "advanced individual contributor" career track before doing the management turnaround. How's…
2933
Raising Children on the Eve of AI
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
2934
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Recording and visualising the 20k system calls it takes to "import seaborn"
Last time we counted CPU instructions, let’s look at syscalls now!
2936
Paying people to work on open source is good
If you have a problem with maintainers getting paid then you have a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
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Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable
When Findaway Voices first appeared, it made it comparatively easy for independent authors to do audiobooks. Audio was still hard, mind you, but it was possible.
2939
UI = f(statesⁿ)
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
2940
I'm an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad
Previous major advancements in Computer Science and its applications always felt empowering to me, AI feels different.