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The Design of the Roland Juno Syntheziser's Oscillators
A comprehensive deep dive into the design of Roland's legendary DCO
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
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Reverse Engineering Source Code of the Biontech Pfizer Vaccine: Part 2
All BNT162b2 vaccine data on this page is sourced from this World Health Organization document. This is a living page, shared already so people can get going! But check back frequently for updates. Translation: Français / 日本語 In short: the vaccine mRNA has been optimized by the manufacturer by changing bits of RNA…
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My Favorite Books 2020
Mostly non-fiction books this year. Some in English, some in German.
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The best things and stuff of 2020
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2020. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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What Is Life? (2019)
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…
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The Big Little Guide to Message Queues
A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today.
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Linux Hardening Guide
Linux is not a secure operating system . However, there are steps you can take to improve it. This guide aims to explain how to harden Linux as much as possible for security and privacy. This guide attempts to be distribution-agnostic and is not tied to any specific one. DISCLAIMER: Do not attempt to apply anything in…
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Well, Actually – Physics Answers
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Talk Less, Listen More
I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...
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Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry
I spent 3 years as an analyst in the reinsurance industry. During this time, I witnessed firsthand how Python is driving rapid technological change. (Goodbye, Excel!)
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Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages…
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Things I Learnt in 2020
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
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How Python attributes work
What happens when we get or set an attribute of a Python object? This question is not as simple as it may seem at first. It is true that any...
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Contributing Without Code
In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy…
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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon
Update 29.01.2023: Adapted the code to work with Mastodon 4.0 and replaced linuxrocks.online by floss.social Update 15.03.2023: Thanks to @veronica@mastodon.online, this code now handles replies in a lot nicer way. You might want check out her solution too. Update 07.07.2023: Thanks to @cassidy@blaede.family, the…
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Against Essential and Accidental Complexity
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
The views expressed in this newsletter are solely my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
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Cider 1.0
You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. – Maya Angelou CIDER started its life as an effort to replace a hacked version of SLIME1 with a proper environment for Clojure development on Emacs. Many of you probably don’t remember those days, but initially almost everyone was using a…
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time
While building a timer app I came across a peculiarity with displaying time and found out that the iPhone timer addresses it by showing you a fake time.
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Experimenting on My Hearing Loss
var loadAudios = function() { WaveSurfer.create({ container: '#generated', mediaControls: true, backend: 'MediaElement', waveColor: '#fff', height: 64