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CADing and 3D printing like a software engineer
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
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How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
First we discussed the fact that technical issues cause remote meetings to suck. Then, we discussed how even when there are no technical issues, remote meetings still suck. They suck because they e…
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YX Problem
Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they're really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I've seen...
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
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Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
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Using the 5S Principle in Coding
A few years ago, I read The Toyota Way, driven by my curiosity about the origins of Agile software development. However, I became even more…
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Bureaucrat Mode
The road to hell is paved via collaboration, consensus, inclusiveness, stability
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Sorry, wrong number
Road numbering is a system with clear rules. What happens when the people responsible for numbering roads don't follow them?
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In Response to Google
Google has chosen to send a response to my article to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. Here is my response. (1) On the March 2019 core update claim in the piece: This is baseless speculation. The March 2019 core update was designed to improve the quality of our search
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Introduction to Golang Preemption Mechanisms
A short explanation of what is preemption and how it works
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Measuring personal growth
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
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How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
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Notes on China
Deeply researched interviews
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The Functional Programming Hiring Problem
If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypothetical functional programming language called Gooby. In these discussions, often someone…
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Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
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Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes and I Am Not Laughing
I've followed through on my commitment to interview in the tech industry without relying entirely on in-network referrals as I normally do (for a good reason - my network consists largely of the most competent people at mediocre companies!). It is dystopian out there. These are some anecdotes on my interviewing…
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Compile-time JSON deserialization in C++
(Discussion on HackerNews)
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Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover
[English]These are currently difficult times for customers and resellers of VMware products who want to reorder, extend licenses or simply activate product licenses. After the Broadcom takeover…
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The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Don't bet on the joys of pokies (2011)
When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had b...
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The "it" in AI models is the dataset
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. More than anyone really has any right to train. As I’ve spent these hours observing the effects of tweaking various model configurations and h
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Steam's Last Stand
In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…
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Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…
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Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
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Why I don't do Domain Driven Design (2018)
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design
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Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…