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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,153 posts.
A Poor Man's API
Creating a full-fledged API requires resources, both time and money. You need to think about the model, the design, the REST principles, etc., without writing a single line of code. Most of the time, you don’t know whether it’s worth it: you’d like to offer a Minimum Viable Product and iterate from there. I want to…
EU Regulator: Proposal to force websites to pay telcos puts Internet at risk
Europe’s top telecom regulator dealt a strong blow to Europe’s biggest telecoms in a report released in October, finding “no evidence” to justify the proposal from large broadband companies like Deutsche Telekom and Orange to force websites and apps to pay them. The report comes after European Commission
Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results
Negative prompts can be far superior than traditional prompt additions.
The Buy and Hold Mindset
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
Enabling the Future of GitHub's REST API with API Versioning
We’re introducing calendar-based versioning for our REST API, so we can keep evolving our API, whilst still giving integrators a smooth migration path and plenty of time to update their integrations.
Protect me from what I want
Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out…
How thick is a three-sided coin?
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
Building a High Performance Data Integration Framework in Go
Behind the scenes of building CloudQuery — architectural decisions, engineering challenges, and lessons learned creating the open-source cloud asset inventory.
The Oceanic+ app comes to Apple Watch Ultra
Today, the Oceanic+ app comes to Apple Watch Ultra, turning Apple’s most rugged watch into a fully capable, easy-to-use dive computer.
Capsaicin is a psychoactive substance
Capsaicin, the active substance in chili peppers, acts on vanilloid receptors (TRPV1) and alters adrenaline and endorphine levels.
Intentionally making close friends
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
Everything I wish I knew when learning C
Learning C was quite difficult for me. The basics of the language itself weren’t so bad, but “programming in C” requires a lot of other kinds of knowledge which aren’t as easy to pick up on:
SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow
I've been sitting on publishing these notes for a while, because I don't want to diminish the work of the talented people that engineered SwiftUI and plowed through years of AppKit and UIKit code to get to this state. But I'd like to draw attention to some performance limitations, in the hope that a SwiftUI engineer…
Falsehoods programmers believe about undefined behavior
All kinds of reasonable-sounding beliefs about undefined behavior are wrong. Let's go through them.
Open Source and Saying “No”
An Open Source project can balloon to extreme sizes and then lose purpose of why it started - a rant.
Guide to FFmpeg
The ins and outs of FFmpeg, fundamental concepts, media transcoding, and video and audio processing with practical examples for developers.
GCC undefined behaviors are getting wild
Happy with my recent breakthrough in understanding C integer divisions after weeks of struggle, I was minding my own business having fun writing integer arithmetic code. Life was good, when suddenly… zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) .
The AI war and how to win it
The battle for the future of the world
Clang is better than GCC
Yes, this is a problem of weak static typing of pure C. Pure C is a great tool for some jobs, but here be dragons , as they say.
Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report, Third Quarter 2022
We’re sharing details about three deceptive networks we took down during the last quarter.
Git Notes
the short of it is: they’re cool for appending notes from automated systems (like ticket or build systems) but not really for having interactive conversations with other developers (at least not yet)
The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi
Not really. As a counter example, gold is clear and very old ponzi. It's ok. And as a more general argument, crypto does have utility. For circumventing capital controls, buying drugs or laundering money. So there will be constant supply of new depositors who needs that and willing to pay. I would not bet on crypto…
Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming
An Introduction to Statistical Process Control.
Emacs Lisp shorthands as namespacing system
In Emacs version 28 Emacs developers introduced so-called read symbol shorthands. If you’re interested in the rationale, feel free to search the Emacs developer mailing list for the discussion. However, it does seem that not everyone likes the idea of shorthands as a substitution for namespaces (or packages, if you’re…
Index Merges vs. Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
Composite indexes aka multi-column indexes are about 10x faster than index merges. In Postgres, the gap is larger than in MySQL because Postgres doesn’t support index-only scans for queries that involve index merges.
Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
Please. It’s an insult to my brain. Like, you put the button in one place, and then you’re like “nah, let’s move it somewhere else.” Here…
CRDT: Fractional Indexing
Collaborative peer-to-peer applications sometimes need to operate on sequences of objects with a consistent order across all peers. For example, a peer-to-peer photo album application might need to sync the order in which photos appear in an album.