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On “White Fragility”
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,567 posts.
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Better Geometry Through Graph Theory (2018)
A few months ago, I decided to implement set operations on curved regions. I had the the canonical textbook on computational geometry , which described approaches for polygons comprised of straight lines, and it seemed like other projects had extended these techniques to parametric curves . I figured it would take a…
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Apple’s Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View
Apple’s announcement of “Apple Silicon” is important for many reasons. Delivering on such an undertaking is the result of remarkable…
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Why Does DARPA Work?
I'm doing some reconstruction. If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link .
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Software should be designed to last
And why I am trying to minimize my dependence on external libraries (whenever possible).
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Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
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Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination
As work progresses on Godot 4.0 at a steady pace, a novel method of creating full-scene global illumination has been added in the master branch.
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Guide to Linux System Calls (2016)
This complete guide explains all about Linux system calls with sample codes and results.
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Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned
Console is the epitome of Apple’s problem with tools and support for its users, and is exactly what it needs to fix.
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Taking Up Animation as a Hobby
Whatever else happens, you made a movie... Nobody can take that away. A hundred years from now, when we're all dead and gone, people will be watching this fucking thing.
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How we got our AWS bill to around 2% of revenue
Leveraging AWS lightsail to achieve a minimal AWS bill
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GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value
I know that floating-point arithmetic is a bit crazy on modern computers. For example, floating-point numbers are not associative: 0.1+(0.2+0.3) == 0.599999999999999978 (0.1+0.2)+0.3 == 0.600000000000000089 But, at least, this is fairly consistent in my experience. You should simply not assume fancy properties like…
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The FDA's perpetual process machine
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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Using Zig to provide stack traces on kernel panic on bare metal (2018)
Last week, I reached an exciting milestone in my career as a programmer. For the first time in my life, I ran code directly on hardware , with no Operating System sitting between the bare metal and my code.
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration
Extreme refurbishing of a Commodore SX-64 keyboard. Lots of putty, epoxy resin and spray painting with original color and more :)
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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Die shrink: How Intel scaled down the 8086 processor
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
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Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
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Take control over your feeds to regain mindfulness
A digital feed is an online stream of content which gets updated as new content is pushed by the feed’s sources. Generally, content is created by users on the social media platform, to be consumed by their followers.
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Building a high performance JSON parser
JSON is important, damn near everything that we do as programmers or operators involves JSON at some point. JSON decoding is expensive, if your product talks JSON then performance of marshalling data in and out of JSON is important. This is a talk about designing an efficient replacement for encoding/json.Decoder .
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Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015)
I might be well behind others on this subject, but I’m trying to catch up. I just finished a book entitled Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: how microfinance lost its way and betrayed th…
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FreeDVDBoot – Hacking the Playstation 2 through its DVD player
I've previously discussed how the PlayStation 2 doesn't have any good entry-point software exploits for launching homebrew. You need to either purchase a memory card with an exploit pre-installed (or a memory card to USB adapter), a HDD expansion bay (not available to slim consoles), open up the console to block the…
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Cache Oblivious Algorithms
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms Cache-oblivious algorithms seemed incredible to me when I first heard about it in 6.854 (Advanced Algorithms). It’s relatively straightforward to imagine algorithms that utilizes information about page size $B$ and cache size $M$ to create efficient data structures. However, cache-oblivious…
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Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed
The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is now available in North America and selected EMEA countries* certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed to work straight out of the box. This is the first system available on the market with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, released in April 2020, and continues the long-standing partnership…
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Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
Radio signals from deep space: Astronomers including researchers at MIT have detected the first periodic fast radio burst from 500 million light years away.