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Why fusion will never happen (2012)
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
3332
Is the FSF Fighting the Previous War?
This is a bit genuine red meat and perhaps a little sensitive for some people but it does raise a point that deserves discussion. A shorthand for that point is the title of today’s post. A more descriptive way of describing it is, “Is the FSF’s demand for purity actually harming the users they’re striving to protect?”
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Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?
attached is signature proof
3335
Using Mypy in Production
At Spring, we maintain a large Python monorepo with complete Mypy coverage configured under Mypy’s strictest available settings. In short, that means every function signature is annotated and implicit Any conversions are disallowed.
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Unix's technical history is mostly old now
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
3338
Notes on Effective Altruism
Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at…
3339
Behind the Pretty Frames: Elden Ring
When Elden Ring got released, I knew that i wanna sneak peak behind the curtains and look what is lying in there. i won’t claim that i’m the die-hard fan of solus genre, but i’m a die-hard gamer for the 3rd person genere and i like to try them even if they’re not in the sub-genere i love. I’m probably more biased…
3340
Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget
I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written. Video is a different beast, entirely. Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format…
3341
The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)
Why is it getting so much worse?
3342
Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
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Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.
3344
AWS is not a dumb pipe
In 1997, David Isenberg wrote an article called the Rise of the Stupid Network. Isenberg worked at Bell Labs, the R&D lab of AT&T, and was responsible for some significant breakthroughs during the PC and the early int...
3345
Energy vs. Sovereign Bond Markets
October 9, 2022 Latest Articles: A Look at the Lightning Network Energy: The Area Under the Curve This newsletter issue focuses on recent problems with developed country sovereign bond markets and how energy supply constraints pose an ongoing problem for them. The Sovereign Bond Bubble During much of 2019 and 2020…
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The City of London’s oldest document is currently on public display
A document that was written just a year after William the Conquer did his conquering has gone on display in the City of London.
3348
The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
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Ice Spikes: Strange things you can find in your freezer
Temperature is certainly a factor when growing ice spikes, and we have done experiments that show that spikes are more likely to form when the temperature is just below freezing (see the graphs below). I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but I suspect that the ice tube freezes shut before the tube gets very long if…
3351
Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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Behind the Scenes: The pots, pans, and people that make millions of meals
Our recipe for feeding includes giant paella pans, combi ovens, and a lot of love!
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Potato diet community trial
In French, the word for potato is pomme de terre. This literally translates to apple of the earth. By this logic, potatoes are the lowest-hanging fruit of all. More seriously: We keep getting more …
3355
The Bitcoin Investment Thesis Is Broken
Informed Tip of the Week: Take a look at our recent series of posts covering Informed’s premise and our business model. We will be adding additional content over the next few weeks. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about most of the obvious bubbles out there and how Continue Reading
3356
Twitter, when the wall came down
I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space , it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was…
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Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer
After trying many ways to get around paywalls, I've landed on 12ft.io. It's simply awesome.
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You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging
There are still many situations where it's not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn't learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For now, let's pretend that's axiomatic: a certain amount of debugging (and even testing)…
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They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing (2005)
Lists play an important role in Lisp--for reasons both historical and practical. Historically, lists were Lisp's original composite data type, though it has been decades since they were its only such data type. These days, a Common Lisp programmer is as likely to use a vector, a hash table, or a user-defined class or…