14221
Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down
We build complex mathematical formulas bottom-up using pure lambda calculus. Includes instructions of how to translate Taylor series and other approximations to lambda terms.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,870 posts.
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14223
A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
Narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources are superior to broadband (white) light for scanning color negative film; there are very good reasons why all commercial film scanners use RGB. ( film scanners were using blue LEDs at least a decade before they would be widely used in consumer products! ) Scanning film with…
14224
No Salt
This is by my brother, Sam. I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the…
14225
Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%. This goal will be achieved through a high-level design overhaul…
14226
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
The context is smarter than you.
14227
Replacing Liquid Metal on an Asus Zephyrus G15's CPU
I’ve been using the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 as my daily driver for a few years now. Laptops (gaming laptops especially) pack a lot of heat-generating components in a small and thin space, where the only airflow comes from the small blower fans in the system. In the case of the Zephyrus G15, there’s approximately 120…
14228
Debugging a rustc segfault on Illumos
Using `mdb` and `pmap` to find the cause of a crash.
14229
C++'s `noexcept` can sometimes help or hurt performance
Over the course of working on PSRayTracing (PSRT), I've been trying to find all sorts of tricks and techniques to squeeze out more performance from this C++ project. Most of it tends to be alternative algorithms, code rewriting, and adjusting data structures. I thought sprinkling the final keyword like an all purpose…
14230
Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
14231
A cryptographically secure bootloader for RISC-V in Rust
A summary of a Codethink sponsored project which implements a cryptographically secure bootloader, written in Rust, for RISC-V.
14232
Mysteries of the Griffin iMate and the Apple Extended Keyboard II
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
14233
How to Get or Create in PostgreSQL
And why it is so easy to get wrong...
14234
How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
14235
Starting Hospice
I’m entering hospice. It’s time, and realistically past time. The squamous cell carcinoma tumors are growing, and the two doses of spot radiation I got on June 10 and 12 have utterly destroyed what…
14236
Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
14237
How I Program in 2024
I talk a lot here about using computers freely , how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm…
14238
Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.
14239
Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues
You may have heard about instability issues with Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors. The issue has been gaining more attention as time goes on. I am posting to share what we've experienced here at Puget Systems, and what we're doing about it.
14240
Enum class improvements for C++17, C++20 and C++23
The evolution of the C++ language continues to bring powerful features that enhance code safety, readability, and maintainability. Among these improvements, we got changes and additions to enum class functionalities across C++17, C++20, and C++23. In this blog post, we’ll explore these advancements, focusing on…
14241
Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers
Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow! Except they don’t…
14242
A primer on the current state of longevity research
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
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Dispatches from the farm upstate
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
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Jerk
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
14245
Making your own hot sauce
I like hot sauces. My favourite is Ring of fire, a hot sauce that I first encountered in the US. It is a mix of habanero and serrano chillis, tomatoes, vinegar and spices. It is very tasty and (des…
14246
Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason
tl;dr: high_impact is small game engine for 2D action games. It's written in C, compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as to WASM for the Web. It's “inspired by” my original Impact JavaScript game engine from 2010. The name high_impact is a nod to a time when C was considered a high level language.
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Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild (2018)
I became fascinated with guilds when I moved to Germany. Being an avid reader of all medieval history I could get my hands on, I was well aware of the Hansa (slang for Hanseatic) League’s ris…
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You can contribute to KDE with non-C++ code
Lots of underrated areas to work on
14249
How I Use "AI"
I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them.
14250
Evaluating a class of infinite sums in closed form
A family of infinite sums that evaluate to rational numbers, sometimes integers, and and effective algorithm for finding the sum.