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Reproducible Git Bundles
Describes how to create reproducible and deterministic one-file bundles of git repositories for use cases such as backups.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,299 posts.
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TKey is a RISC-V computer in a USB-C case, that can run security applications
Introduction # The Tillitis TKey is a small computer in a USB stick form factor that can run small device applications that are loaded onto it. The purpose of the TKey is to be a secure environment for applications that provide some kind of security function. Some examples of such security functions are: Time-based…
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Stupid Patent of the Month: Selfie Contests
Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out about for more than 20...
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Unblocking User Freedom: the right to use adblockers
Companies increasingly aim to control how users interact with their content online, threatening user freedom. As more companies crack down on browser exten...
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Non-interactive SSH password authentication
Instead of using sshpass to non-interactively provide an SSH password, here is a simpler approach by harnessing the built-in features of OpenSSH...
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Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom
Minimised clearances, active hoods, new materials, new drive technologies – surely modern cars have reached their pinnacle?
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Ruby 3.3
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.3.0. Ruby 3.3 adds a new parser named Prism, uses Lrama as a parser generator, adds a new pure-Ruby JIT comp...
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The C++20 Naughty and Nice List for Game Devs
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
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Post-apocalyptic life in American health care
Experiences navigating disintegrating American health care institutions, and what they might imply for life in 2037
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Fake It 'Til You Fake It
Since Google’s introduction of its Pixel 8 phones earlier this month, it has been interesting and a little amusing to me to read the reactions to its image manipulation tools. It feels like we have been asking the same questions every year — questions like what is a photograph, anyway?, and has technology gone too […]
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
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"Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models"
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…
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Interview about Austral, a systems programming language with linear types
Austral is a new systems programming language. It uses linear types to provide memory safety and capability-secure code, and is designed to be simple enough to be understood by a single person, with a focus on readability, maintainability, and modularity.
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Costs of running a macOS app studio business
I created The low-tech guys, a brand under which I develop macOS apps for a living. I started this business with a good friend of mine, thinking I could help him stop working long hours at his consulting job and ease into more creative work. However, getting to a state where you earn enough to live off the app sales…
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Enlightenment 0.26
This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes mostly with some new features.
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Resetting the timer in my toothbrush
It’s still good to use, I swear
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Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
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Unveiling the big leap in Ruby 3.3's IRB
In this blog post, we will delve into the major enhancements introduced in Ruby 3.3’s IRB, as well as what’s currently planned for the next year.
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The Limits to Growth (1972)
The complete original Limits to Growth study is now freely accessible online, thanks to the Donella Meadows Institute and the Dartmouth College Library.
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Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020)
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
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How does a B-tree make queries fast?
B-tree is a structure that helps to search through great amounts of data. It was invented over 40 years ago, yet it is still employed by the majority of modern databases. Although there are newer index structures, like LSM trees, B-tree is unbeaten when handling most of the database queries.
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In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users
In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users. It would not be possible to scale without the help from our beloved community. A million thanks for your energ…
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Xmas.c (1988)
The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…
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Bayesians moving from defense to offense
Erik van Zwet, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, Steve Goodman, and I write :
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Indexing a billion pages
It’s two years since we launched Mwmbl, the open source, non-profit search engine, on Boxing Day 2021. A good time to take stock of where we are and where we’re going. We’ve indexed over 100 million pages Thanks to our volunteers, who crawl the web using the Firefox extension and command line script, we’re crawling up…
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Understanding every byte in a WASM module
In my last post, we explored how to build WASM modules, both with and without WASI support, using Clang. In a comment on Reddit, it was mentioned that much of the setup I walked through in that post could be avoided by just leveraging Zig’s WASI supprt. This is a great point, and I would recommend doing the same. The…
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Let me repeat that back to you
Two-phase commit for humans
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Was BASIC that horrible or better?
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
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How Pinterest scaled
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply