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Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer
A few months ago, exhausted by a constant stream of people perennially disappointed about reward structures at companies, I made what…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
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How to add thousands of lights to your renderer and not die in the process
Why ReSTIR is good for you.
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Special Relativity and Middle-Earth
This post is an unofficial sequel to one of my first blog posts from 2007, which was entitled “Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider”. One of the oldest and most famous allegories is Plato&…
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Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Some speculative hypotheses
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How to pick a good monitor for software development
Buying a new monitor is stressful because there's so many things to understand. After reading this article, you will know what to look for.
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Alain de Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence means
“The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning othe…
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The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
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Solving my truck’s TPMS sensor problem with the help of an RTL-SDR dongle
This post is going to be a bit different from my usual posts. It’s still about computers, but it’s about a different type of computer: the computer modules in my 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup. Vehicles these days have lots of computers in them. I’ve historically been afraid to mess too much with them in fear of screwing…
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Virtual offices are not remote-friendly workplaces
The pandemic made evident how much work can, and should, be different. The forced change to accommodate remote workflows also brought to light what I like to call “virtual offices”. Unlike truly remote friendly workplaces optimized for asynchronous communication, these aim to merely transport the office into a virtual…
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Eight studies reveal a bias in human imagination
Eight studies reveal a (possibly universal) bias in human imagination
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Do data-driven companies win?
Some gut-based judgements on the effectiveness of data.
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The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe
Lessons from Atlantropa, the megaproject to unite Europe (& erase Africa)
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Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics
The supply chain crunch, modern logistics, and that famous trip around the Port of Long Beach
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The Modern Observability Problem
The observability problem - Why is the system exhibiting this behaviour?
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Why have I never heard of the Ene-Farm? (2017)
While reading up on architecture in Japan recently, I came across a technology that I hadn’t heard of before: the Ene-Farm. It’s a domestic energy system that is being used in Japan and…
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Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE
In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…
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Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I live-…
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How to make sure no dynamic memory is used
How to disable heap (dynamic memory allocation) in an embedded application? This article goes into the details of linker files and how to detect dynamic memory allocation.
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Making all your integers positive with zigzag encoding
You sometimes feel the need to make all of your integers positive, without losing any information. That is, you want to map all of your integers from 'signed' integers (e.g., -1, 1, 3, -3) to 'unsigned integers' (e.g., 3,2,6,7). This could be useful if you have a fast function to compress integers that fails to ……
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The internet was designed with a narrow waist
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
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Visi On by VisiCorp – The obscure first full GUI for the IBM PC
Visi On was the first full GUI for the IBM PC. First demonstrated by VisiCorp at Fall Comdex 1982 and released at the end of 1983, just prior to the Apple Macintosh, it pre-dated the release of Microsoft Windows by several years.
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Rust on Espressif chips Q1 2022
Scott Mabin's blog
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Simple declarative schema migration for SQLite
At my company we use a small SQLite database. We define the schema in a single file with SQL CREATE TABLE statements. If we add tables, columns, or indexes, our application will create them automatically the next time it starts up.
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