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Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
Convincing yourself that following more famous people online will lead to a better life is dangerous. You're simply wasting your time.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,820 posts.
1502
The big alcohol study that didn't happen
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
1503
Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge
Brave and Firefox implement support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme. Brave to hijack Bing search links. Plus, the history of all this anti-competitive crap.
1504
Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
1505
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
1506
It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
1507
BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.
1508
FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
1509
A Macintosh History 85.10
The creation of the original Macintosh has been extensively studied and written about, but what happened after it launched? What was it like to own a Macintosh in the mid-eighties? I intend to tell this story of the Macintosh through the pages of MacUser.
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Finally, on CBS, the football matches the business cards
The score bar at the bottom of the screen during a football game has an obvious function: It tells you how many points a team has scored. In some cases, such as the 2021 Chicago Bears, this function is ceremonial. Nonetheless, we primarily use the score bar as an information
1512
Word-Aligned Bloom Filters
Programmers often need to 'filter out' data. Suppose that you are given a database of users where only a small percentage are 'paying customers' (say 5% or less). You can write an SQL query to check whether a given user is indeed a paying customer, but it might require a round trip to your database … Continue reading…
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“Static Linking Considered Harmful” Considered Harmful
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
1515
Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office
A few months ago I moved to a few acres in the country, and needed somewhere to work - so I built myself a solar powered off grid office out of a Tuff-Shed Pro Studio! On one side, I’ve built a great desk corner with plenty of power and more than enough AC to keep me cool when it’s over 100F out.
1516
John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
1517
R, OpenMP, MKL, Disaster
The answer should be something close to ALPHA , i.e. 0.01 . What R was printing out was weird numbers like 1e-10 .
1518
Beware Centralization
Imagine merging three public firms, by making each firm into a division of a single new firm with one new boss.
1519
Mac SE/30 Odyssey
I’ve always wanted an Apple Macintosh SE/30 . Released in 1989, they look quite a lot like the other members of the original “compact Mac” series, but pack in a ton of interesting features that the other compact Macs don’t have.
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Why we spent the last month eliminating PostgreSQL subtransactions
How a mysterious stall in database queries uncovered a performance limitation with PostgreSQL.
1522
What Happened to Treehouse?
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
1523
Gentle introduction to GPUs inner workings
This article summarizes some lower level aspect of how GPU executes. Although GPU programming is not that complicated when compared to CPU, it also doesn’t match to what hardware is doing exactly. The reason is that we can’t just program GPU without some API, which is an abstraction over its inner workings. Since few…
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
1527
PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack
PipeWire has already made great strides forward in terms of improving the audio handling situation on Linux, but one of the original goals was to also bring along the video side of the house. In fact in the first few releases of Fedora Workstation where we shipped PipeWire we solely enabled it as a tool...
1528
Factorio's Belt Bug
Factorio is a factory-building game involving lots (and I mean, LOTS) of conveyor belts. The code that implements these belts is marvel of optimization, but unfortunately they can't handle every construct.
1529
Tanaka Hisashige, builder of the Myriad Year Clock (2016)
Japan's greatest inventor whose life span a formative period in the nation's history, Tanaka Hisashige built the Myriad Year Clock, a 1000-part masterpiece that's today a national treasure.
1530
Chicken and Egg Problem (2000)
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…