2131
Attribution is dying, clicks are dying
Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we've got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I'm being intentionally provocative. But it's because
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
2132
Do Penguins Have Knees? (2019)
What is the penguin’s skeleton truly made of? Do penguins actually have knees? Why do penguins walk that way. Find out here!
2133
New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive
Warp drives are staples of science fiction, and in principle could propel spaceships faster than the speed of light. However, there are many problems with constructing them in practice, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy. Nevertheless, physicists have been exploring the…
2134
Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?
I recently went down a very deep rabbit hole to understand why, some months, Cloudflare was charging us 3x what we were expecting for their Cloudflare Images service. I’m posting this write-up because back then, a quick search didn’t turn anything up; and Cloudflare support has totally ghosted us for more than 8…
2135
An Open Course on LLMs, Led by Practitioners
A free survey course on LLMs, taught by practitioners.
2136
Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation
This article introduces the implementation difficulties and challenges of Movable Tree CRDTs when collaboration, and how Loro implements it and sorts child nodes. The algorithm has high performance and can be used in production.
2137
Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
2138
Higher-kinded bounded polymorphism in OCaml (2021)
How bounded higher-kinded polymorphism arises in practice, and how to express it in OCaml, in several different ways. Some ways are rather concise -- but less widely known.
2139
tolower() with AVX-512
A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.
2140
Microsoft technical breakdown of CrowdStrike incident
We examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause.
2141
Perfectionism – one of the biggest productivity killers in the eng industry
It can cause immense stress and can lead to burnout 🤯 Don't worry, we're sharing our mistakes, so hopefully you'll avoid some!
2142
How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
2143
My mental model of setf was wrong
Lisp lets programs define new setf forms for assignment. The most common example is from CLOS , where a class like this:
2144
A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes
Key concepts & much deserved YAML ranting
2145
My Obsidian note-taking workflow
A Vim-Inspired Approach to Efficient Note Management with Obsidian and Markdown
2146
My favorite tools and techniques for procedural gamedev
An overview of some of my favorite shaders, algorithms, and techniques I use to aid my work in procedural gamedev and 3D scenes. It focuses particularly on things that can be added or mixed in to enhance non-procedural scenes.
2147
Back to our roots
Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.
2148
How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
2149
Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
2150
Lessons from Ancient File Systems
In my previous post , I mentioned that I found a number of oddities when digging through the details of various Atari 8-bit file systems. I...
2151
Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
The Intel N100-based Radxa x4 has taken the headlines over the last week or so, and for good reason! Does the x86 SBC live up to the hype?
2152
Tritone Substitutions
A ‘tritone substitution’ is a popular trick for making your music sound more sophisticated. I’ll show you a couple of videos with lots of examples. But since I’m mathematici…
2153
An Interview with Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut (1999)
Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of
2154
The US fiscal mess: Some unpleasant fiscal simulations
Based on recent projections, the US federal debt is expected to grow to historic highs over the next decade. This column uses the FRB-US model to simulate fiscal scenarios for the US. Across all fiscal consolidations considered, the debt/GDP ratio and interest bill increase at least until 2026-2027. Growth is not a…
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2156
Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
2157
Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
2158
Taking a Radio Camping
The noise floor is a lot lower in the forest
2159
Linux Network Performance Ultimate Guide
https://blog.packagecloud.io/illustrated-guide-monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/
2160
Crooks Bypassed Google's Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Acces
Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google’s “Sign in with Google” feature.