The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
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…
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
A summary of a Codethink sponsored project which implements a cryptographically secure bootloader, written in Rust, for RISC-V.
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
And why it is so easy to get wrong...
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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…
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
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…
CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.
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.
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…
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…
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
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.
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…
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.
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…
Lots of underrated areas to work on
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.
A family of infinite sums that evaluate to rational numbers, sometimes integers, and and effective algorithm for finding the sum.
If the police ever have physical access to an electronic device like a laptop, even for five minutes , they can install hardware keyloggers, create images of the storage media, or otherwise trivially compromise it at the hardware, firmware, or software level. One way to minimize this risk is to make devices…
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your defin…
Google has been a leader on AI development for more than a decade by also being a leader in chip development for more than a decade.
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]
Disclaimer: This is to the best of my knowledge. It's a complicated topic, there are tons of options, and this only covers a tiny fraction of this topic anyway. If you spot mistakes, please tell me.
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
By sheer accident, UBC researchers created a new super-black material that absorbs almost all light and trademarked it as Nxylon.
