Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility . It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for precedence. find may…
I remember thinking at school when will I ever in my “real life” use maths. Well much to my utter surprise I’ve come to the stark realisation that there is a link between mathematics and crochet. …
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to ...
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
America's major high-tech manufacturing industries have not escaped the general decline in manufacturing employment.
There are several aspects of Rust that I’m not particularly fond of but the one that takes the cake is core::io::BorrowedBuf which I despise with passion. It’s a nightly feature which puts in question my extreme emotions about it. On the other hand it means there’s time to stop it from getting stabilised and figure…
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
Some people who had previously disabled Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 saw it re-enabled after updating to macOS 15.3.1 and iOS 18.3.1 today. In fact I personally have two different Apple silicon Macs running macOS Sequoia, and after I updated both Macs to 15.3.1, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled on my…
Obligatory: the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views and opinions of my employer. In light of all the hype going around about ChatGPT, I wanted to offer my “hot take” on what the next 2-5 years
Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…
The unspoken agreement that made Microsoft's lower pay tolerable has fundamentally broken.
It’s been nearly four years since I published Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: HowI Learned To Love Tail Calls inC.In that article, I presented a technique I co-d...
It is a somewhat common question to me: how do we write C in curl to make it safe and secure for billions of installations? Some precautions we take and decisions we make. There is no silver bullet, just guidelines. As I think you can see for yourself below they are also neither strange nor … Continue reading Writing…
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was…
A few years ago when I was into reverse engineering and binary analysis (and game modding), I did a lot of research into anticheats work. I was curious about tracking their updates, since that would allow me to:
Typst's math mode has a strange precedence problem that most people using it will run into at some point.
Ultrassembler is a superfast and complete RISC-V assembler library that I'm writing as a component of the bigger Chata signal processing project.
Hamilton’s quaternion number system $latex {\mathbb{H}}&fg=000000$ is a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers, consisting of numbers of the form $latex {t + xi + yj + zk}&f…
There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers.
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat . Invented in the late 1980s, it's one of the oldest and most popular realtime chat protocols. Despite being over 30 years old, it's still actively developed, and hundreds of thousands of people still use it to chat every day.
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versi…
Apple's new transparent design system has obvious readability issues that Apple's own design standards should have caught.
What signs to look for and how to increase productivity with all-round skillset
"So, is everyone losing their minds yet?" My ex-coworker asked me over yahoo messenger. He quit after getting enraged by new work policies that specifically targeted him. I looked up from my screen,
September 15 update: @YouTubeInsider confirmed that the issue is related to viewers who have adblockers enabled—YouTube's been in an arms race with ad blocking tools, and the fallout is a substantial cut in counted views for creators who have a large audience watching from desktop. Many YouTube content creators…
