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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,939 posts.
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I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it. Here's what I know.
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Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
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Sleep helps process emotions
Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health…
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
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The problem with Bitcoin miners
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
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Who owns the copyright to my medical images? (2018)
I popped round to an NHS dentist a few months ago - and they stuck my head on one of these contraptions. The Kodak 8000C takes a panoramic X-ray, giving a superior view of your teeth. Nifty. The dentist showed me where my wisdom teeth were and I was impressed with how high resolution the image was. Afterwards, I asked…
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Golang Diaries: Generics
My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina , an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I…
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Liberating out-of-copyright photos from SmartFrame's DRM
During the middle of the 20th Century, the UK's Royal Air Force took thousands of photographs of the country from above. Think of it like a primitive Google Earth. Those photographs are "Crown Copyright". For photographs created before 1st June 1957, the copyright expires after 50 years. Recently, the organisation…
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Own your calendar and contacts with OpenBSD, Baïkal, and FOSS Android
Writer for Semaphore and ButterCMS. Previously Staff Engineer at Deliveroo and in technical leadership at various public sector organisations.
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Cron-based backup for SQLite
Litestream replicates SQLite databases in real-time to S3.
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A lock-free, concurrent, generic queue in 32 bits
While considering concurrent queue design I came up with a generic, lock-free queue that fits in a 32-bit integer. The queue is “generic” in that a single implementation supports elements of any arbitrary type, despite an implementation in C. It’s lock-free in that there is guaranteed system-wide progress. It can…
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You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
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Wrong by Default
A few programming languages use a “defer” pattern for resource cleanup. This is a construct such as a defer keyword which schedules cleanup code to run at the end of the enclosing block (or function). This is available in Zig, Go and even in GCC C.
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Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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Time-Series Compression Algorithms
These algorithms aren't magic – but combined they can save over 90% of storage costs and speed up queries. Here’s how 5 common ones work.
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Java record pattern matching in JDK 19
Enhance the Java programming language with record patterns to deconstruct record values. Record patterns and type patterns can be nested to enable a powerful, declarative, and composable form of data navigation and processing. This is a preview language feature .
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The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlled over the internet by a python script running openCV reading the camera image of my old iPhone. Introduction The pigeons in my backyard find particular pleasures in voiding their excrements onto my balcony. Dissatisfied with this…
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Can we make a black hole? And if we could, what could we do with it?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
Ever since I read about the Make 50 of Something technique in Vi Hart's blog post about Fifty Fizzbuzzes, I wanted to try it for myself! Creating 50 of, well, anything, in quick succession seemed like a fun challenge!
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T cells block nerve cell regeneration with age, but can be reversed – mice study
New research in mice shows T cells prevent damaged nerve cells from regenerating due to a reversible, ageing-related mechanism.
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A clean start for the web (2020)
Daydreaming a post-HTML Utopia
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Why did Heroku fail?
Fifteen years later, developers are still trying to recreate the developer experience of Heroku. Yet, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Why did Heroku fail? Was it just incompetent managemen...
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Take my app ideas
I would rather give away my favorite ideas than to let them go to waste. Please do something with them.