Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
What makes it really fast is a small Rust program called refix that post-processes your build outputs (if you don't want to compile from source, here's a static Linux binary .) Both the program and this document are written for the context of C/C++ source code compiled to native binaries. But this can work with other…
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
Anyone trying to make a new mainstream language is completely insane, unless they're backed by a large corporation. 0
Learn How to Create HTML/ZIP/PNG Polyglot Files!
A video of Panoramax in action. Starting out with a map view which has small orange lines for where images are available. Then going into the actual 360 degree images and moving around. Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most[1]) images are, and...
Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation…
The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot more. This post explains why we'll keep building more,
I have a lovely, and reasonably priced, Mini Panda Rice Cooker. It does not have any SmartHome features. You put in water and rice, press a button, it cooks rice. Nice! The only problem is - I don't know how long the rice will take to cook. It uses "Fuzzy Logic" to work out exactly how much heat and time is needed for…
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this…
How to connect a USB4 SSD to get better performance from an Intel Mac. Should you buy a Thunderbolt 4 hub, or a Thunderbolt 5 dock? Do any of these live ‘up to’ their claimed performanc…
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I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
It's well known that syscalls are expensive. And that software mitigations against CPU bugs (such as Meltdown) even have made them more expensive. But how expensive are they really? To begin to answer this question I wrote a small micro-benchmark in order to measure the minimal costs of a syscall …
Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…
Vulcan & dBASE
My own concatenative programming language
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
I discuss various models of biased bit sequences, and how to extract uniform random (or close to it) output bit sequences from them, illustrated with Python code.
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
Next week, a fairly rare ceremony will take place in and around the Tower of London, and it's even more special than usual this time.
Can anyone solve 1000 Opus Magnum puzzles in 24 hours? What about with assistance from bots? Will the solutions be any good? Let's find out!
Writing userscripts to optimize my data entry workflow with the FDA's 510k database.
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your defin…
At last, the Hamiltonian circuit problem for Rubik's Cube has a solution! To be a little more mathematically precise, a Hamiltonian circuit of the quarter-turn metric Cayley graph for the Rubik's Cube group has been found.
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
