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My encounter with Medley Interlisp
Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,299 posts.
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Shorting Tether
The trials and tribulations of betting against crypto's biggest stablecoin.
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The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
When was the first time you had to use LaTeX? If you are like most people, it was probably suddenly forced upon you during your first math or CS class where you had to start writing proofs, with minimal guidance on how to get started. Unfortunately, this meant that while many people have good operational knowledge of…
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Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)
Timpani-horn interactions:
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OOP in C
The art of good programming depends upon the discipline of the programmer, no matter what language is being used. The purpose of object oriented programming (OOP) is to produce well designed reusable code. In principle OOP can be done in any language, even assembly. This is because all OO language compilers/assemblers…
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Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power
https://youtu.be/uNQLOU8aATc Study: Solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of >9% in photocatalytic water splitting (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05399-1) A new kind of solar panel, developed at the University of Michigan, has achieved 9% efficiency in converting water into hydrogen and oxygen—mimickin
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SDL2 common mistakes and how to avoid them
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
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Jailbroken iOS can't run macOS apps – I spent a week to find out why (2021)
I ran command line macOS tools, such as Bash and Geekbench, on a jailbroken iPhone by replacing iOS’s dyld shared cache (all of iOS’s code) with macOS’s. However, graphical apps will never work: macOS’s WindowServer won’t start, since iOS’s drivers are too different.
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The time I yoga-balled an Apple store employee
My personal website and blog
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There is no software maintenance
Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But t…
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When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98
I’ve covered PC compatibility in the past, and tried to explain how just having an x86 CPU and running DOS does not necessarily make your machine compatible with an IBM PC. At the time, this …
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
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The Safari bug that never was (2022)
In October 2021, Ian, a fellow frontend developer at GDS posted a message in our support channel for the GOV.UK Design System on Slack:
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The Cornell Note Taking System
Why do you take notes? What do you hope to get from your notes? What are Cornell Notes and how do you use the Cornell note-taking system?
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The Rise of Steel – Part I
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel.
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Modern C for C++ peeps (2019)
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
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The beauty of CGI and simple design
Finding someone still singing CGIs praises is surprising, and some alliteration.
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Software horror show: SAP Concur
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Devirtualizing nike.com's bot protection
In this blog post, we'll examine the virtualization obfuscation used by Nike
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Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
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Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering
As a seasoned software engineer, I've discovered that there's so much more to the field than what's taught in school. From the importance of understanding business needs and the value of soft skills, to the necessity of continuous learning and the reality of dealing with legacy code, my journey has been filled with…
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Perfect Circle
How good are your circle drawing skills?
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Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
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Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems
In an organization with many teams, problems will arise that span across these teams and require solutions broader than an individual manager’s purview. These types of projects include things…
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Sunken Greenhouse
All about the Wallapini Sunken Greenhouse with sunken greenhouse benefits, what to plant in an earth shelter greenhouse, steps to build a Wallapini, and more.
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The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
What worked for the long haul, what we cut out over time, and the boring tech that keeps the app alive