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Working in the software industry, circa 1989
Gather round while I tell a tale of old.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,153 posts.
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Beating the Averages (2001)
April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb . Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the…
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Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
Postgres 15 beta 2 was released recently! I enjoy Beta season... reviewing and testing new features is a fun diversion from daily tasks. This post takes a look at an improvement to UNIQUE constraints on columns with NULL values . While the nuances of unique constraints are not as flashy as making sorts faster (that's…
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How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (2014)
“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking… He is trying to arriv…
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Guile Steel: a proposal for a systems Lisp
Before we get into this kind of stream-of-consciousness outline, I'd like to note that very topically to this, over at the Spritely Institute (where I'm CTO, did I mention on here yet that I'm the CTO of a nonprofit to improve networked communication on the internet on this blog? because I don't think I did) we…
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IETF Draft: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
Despite being designed and operated as a decentralized network-of-networks, the Internet is continuously subjected to forces that encourage centralization. This document offers a definition of centralization, explains why it is undesirable, identifies different types of it, catalogues limitations of common approaches…
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New in Calibre 6.0
calibre: The one stop solution for all your e-book needs. Comprehensive e-book software.
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Experian, you have some explaining to do
Twice in the past month KrebsOnSecurity has heard from readers who had their accounts at big-three credit bureau Experian hacked and updated with a new email address that wasn’t theirs. In both cases the readers used password managers to select strong, unique passwords for their Experian accounts. Research suggests…
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Running an Open Source Home Area Network
Insights on running a Home Area Network (HAN) nearly completely on open source software, including configurations and metrics.
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On-device browser translations with Firefox Translations
Firefox can now do offline and privacy-preserving translation of eight languages with more on the way. Powered by open-source and machine-learning.
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SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)
Certain Solid State Drive (SSD) models will experience data loss.
2892
Triangle Grids
Grids are great for tactical gameplay of turn-based games because they allow discrete movement steps. That means that you can bind positioning to other resources such as movement points, action points, food, etc. Grids divide the infinite variety of movement options into a few specific ones, which can be considered…
2893
Beginner's guide to error handling in Rust
Easy to follow guide using practical examples
2894
Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in academic citations?
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF…
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My favorite Erlang container
Forcing Kubernetes to let me do Erlang live code upgrades in a containerized deployment.
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Technical overview of Kandria, a game and game engine developed in Common Lisp
This is a short overview of the development that's gone into "Kandria"(https://kandria.com), the open world action RPG I've been working on in recent years.
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The world needs a non-profit search engine
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine ? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it?
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Every complex idea has a million stupid cousins
Chances are, you've met far more stupid cousins than you realize
2900
Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?
Tech and fashion logos are becoming increasingly similar, all of them using sans serif fonts. Why do they do that? And why it doesn't make sense.
2901
Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” synth sounds
Breaking down the Fairlight and Yamaha CS-80 sounds of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill from Hounds of Love.
2902
Congratulations: We now have opinions on your open source contributions
More thoughts on supply chain and package managers.
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Physicists discover a “family” of robust, superconducting graphene structures
MIT physicsts identified new multilayered configurations of graphene that can be twisted and stacked to elicit robust superconductivity at low temperatures. The study establishes these configurations as the first known “family” of multilayer magic-angle superconductors.
2906
Is the smart grid all hot air?
The US has three "grids." They are the Eastern Interconnect, Western Interconnect, and ERCOT. In technical terms, they are AC wide-area synchronous grids. Let's unpack that.
2907
Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast …
2908
I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
2909
Once seen as fleeting, a new solar tech proves its lasting power
Princeton Engineering researchers have developed the first perovskite solar cell with a 30-year lifespan. The new device is the first of its kind to rival the performance of silicon-based solar cells. A pioneering new test method will help industry develop consumer-friendly products.
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Einstein-Bohr debate settled once and for all
In Steven Pinker’s guest post from last week, there’s one bit to which I never replied. Steve wrote: After all, in many areas Einstein was no Einstein. You [Scott] above all could speak…