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WordPress to support SQLite back end
A few months ago, a proposal was published to make WordPress officially support SQLite. After the proposal received a lot of positive feedback from the community, we started working on an implement…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,925 posts.
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The APL Source Code (2012)
Thousands of programming languages were invented in the first 50 years of the age of computing. Many of them were similar, and many followed a traditional, evolutionary path from their predecessors. What eventually became APL was first a mathematical notation, not as a computer programming language.
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Why we picked Java
Picking a tech stack for your startup isn’t something to do lightly. It’s a choice that will shape the future in many ways: how will the tech enable your emerging product and business, what talent can you attract, and how future-proof is the tech stack?
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Upgrading my old Chumby 8 Linux kernel
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8″ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with…
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Tencent WeChat is now a GitHub secret scanning partner
GitHub secret scanning protects users by searching repositories for known types of secrets. By identifying and flagging these secrets, our scans help prevent data leaks and fraud. We have partnered…
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Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip
“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…
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Boring Python: Code quality
This is the second in a series of posts I intend to write about how to build, deploy, and manage …
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“Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)
Wrong estimates aren’t your fault, but they are definitely your problem
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Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
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Astronomical Calculations for Hard SF in Common Lisp
Hard SF worldbuilding with the HYG database, Dijkstra's algorithm, and Lisp.
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Fast memcpy, a system design
When I worked at Google, fleet-wide profiling revealed that 25-35% of all CPU time was spent just moving bytes around: memcpy, strcmp, copying between user and kernel buffers in network and disk I/…
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Tandem solar cell achieves 32.5 percent efficiency
The tandem solar cell converts 32.5% of the incident solar radiation into electrical energy. This value is now officially certified and included in the NREL chart.
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GCC now includes Modula-2 and Rust. Do they work on OpenBSD?
Two new language frontends have been added to GCC : Modula-2 and Rust . I think this is great news on both accounts: having a Wirth language in GCC fills my childhood heart with joy (though I do wish GNU Pascal can one day be revived and mainlined, as Pascal was the first non- BASIC language I learned). And Rust…
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Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
This paper derives from a short, time-bound, review of the literature, which sought to investigate the question “Did Insurance Fire Brigades let uninsured buildings burn?”. The question is set in the context of property fire insurance in London, from 1680. The situation was possibly comparable with other large British…
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A few new things in Emacs 29
Everybody with an Emacs blogs raves about Emacs 29 these days. Things like Eglot, tree-sitter, SQL support and the like. Well, this is all nice – more than nice, brilliant! – but let’s not forget a few minor advances which are coming with Emacs 29. Let me mention a few things that I especially like.
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Structuring Clojure applications
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
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If you can read this, your browser captions are broken
I’ve seen a lot of captions over the years, and there’s one thing I can tell you with certainty: The way that custom controls and the HTML video element interact right now is inadequate, and I think th...
24021
Special Relativity and Middle-Earth
This post is an unofficial sequel to one of my first blog posts from 2007, which was entitled “Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider”. One of the oldest and most famous allegories is Plato&…
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How many computers are in your computer? (2021)
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
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Enhance Speech from Adobe – Free AI filter for cleaning up spoken audio
This AI audio filter improves spoken audio to make it sound like it was recorded in a soundproofed studio.
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Pollution cleanup method destroys toxic “forever chemicals”
An insidious category of carcinogenic pollutants known as “forever chemicals” may not be so permanent after all. University of California, Riverside, chemical engineering and environmental scientists recently published new methods to chemically break up these harmful substances found in drinking water into smaller…
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Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber
In this blog, we share how we improved the daily edit-build-run developer experience using DevPods, our remote development environment. We will start with some of the initial challenges, the pain points we addressed with Devpod, our architecture, and some of our recent successes in terms of adoption and cost…
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Ubuntu Snap update spoiled my World Cup Final
Goodbye Ubuntu, Goodbye Snaps I missed two goals in the World Cup Finals because of this. It’s not the first time Snap has been a problem, but it’s most definitely the last straw. What happened? I was happily watching the second half of the Fifa World Cup Final, using “ShowMax” – a South African paid … Continue…
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Why fusion will never happen (2012)
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
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Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars
All vehicles lose efficiency and range in very cold weather. Electric cars are no different. The good news, however, is that this range loss is temporary and not as limiting as many people may think.
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GNU/Linux shell related internals
What every SRE should know about GNU/Linux shell related internals: file descriptors, pipes, terminals, user sessions, process groups and daemons # Last updated: Oct 2025 Contents File descriptor and open file description Pipes Process groups, jobs and sessions Terminals and pseudoterminals Despite the era of…