The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,567 posts.
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper computer:…
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …
A short story about SQL's better rival: Michael Stonebraker's storied query language, QUEL.
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…
Over the past few months I've had an ergonomic keyboard obsession. It started out simple, just wanting to improve my typing experience. It ended with me writing a driver. This is my story - now available as an audiobook!
The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 was awarded to World Food Programme (WFP) "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict"
Here's a preview from my zine, Bite Size Bash ! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics !
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020218 points30 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week, we looked at how a blacksmith reshapes our iron from a spo…
Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
A few weeks ago I got curious about an old cable modem sitting in my closet, a Motorola MB7220. Initially I was interested in what kind of hardware it had and if it was running Linux. Some quick searching brought me to a thread on a web forum where people were discussing the built in spectrum analyzer feature used for…
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
A blog about life between two parens.
The feature store is a data warehouse of features for machine learning (ML)....
Between the period of July 6th to October 6th myself, Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipour, Samuel Erb, and Tanner Barnes worked together and hacked on the Apple bug bounty program.
Privacy Badger was created to protect users from pervasive non-consensual tracking, and to do so automatically, without relying on human-edited lists of known trackers. While our goals remain the same, our approach is changing. It is time for Privacy Badger to evolve.Thanks to disclosures from...
This post has been a long time in coming. I stopped reading HN over a month ago, so I’ve had some time to cool off. I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts into words, and so this pos…
This article will focus on discussing why the ancient text editor 'ed' works the way it does.
I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.
Writing quality software is hard. Sometimes, software breaks in entertaining ways. However, when software runs everything from personal assistants like Alexa and Google Home to banking to elections, some bugs can be much more severe. Thi...
In 2001, Microsoft's former CEO— Steve Ballmer— was quoted by the online tech news publication, The Register, saying: Linux is a
