3751
Old tech is haunted
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
3752
For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
NEW YORK TIMES October 17, 1993 For Best Results, Forget the Bonus By Alfie Kohn “Do this and you’ll get that.” These six words sum up the most popular way in which American business strives…
3753
Exercises for understanding Haskell Lenses (2019)
No matter how many blog posts and tutorials I read about lenses, it seems like there's no replacement for just using them to get an intuition. So here are some exercises I came up with. While they shouldn't be all that difficult, they build up from some basic knowledge about lenses up to the more advanced usages of…
3754
Protocols, not platforms
Does everybody get to coin one maxim in their lives? If so, here’s mine: Everything gets worse. Let’s say you’re shopping at the grocery, when you notice a new food product. It competes directly with
3755
Migrating from Warp to Axum
Falling out of love with warp Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper. I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’...
3756
3757
The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems
Bill Harris points to this cartoon from Randall Munroe. I think he (Munroe) is really on to something here. Not about Bayes’s theorem but about the sorts of examples that are in textbooks.
3758
3759
3760
If AI can read, then plain text can be weaponized (2019)
Advances in AI have helped automate many tasks that involve processing text. However, text-processing AI algorithms have their own unique vulnerabilities, researchers at IBM, Amazon and University of Texas have found.
3761
Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
3762
Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
3763
Let's build a decentralized social network together with Logseq
Software engineer and writer exploring web development, productivity systems, AI, and creative projects. Sharing insights on building better tools and…
3764
3765
Mailbag: Sausage Men
I haven't done a mailbag for a long time, but this is a common enough question that I thought I'd explain my thinking here. ...
3766
Meshtastic: A Review
The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).
3767
Making Rust a Better Fit for Cheri and Other Platforms
Recently, Aria Beingessner published an interesting essay “ Rust’s Unsafe Pointer Types Need An Overhaul ”. There are several parts to this essay, all of which address issues which cause me pain in Rust, and which I would love to see fixed. I want to focus on one issue: Rust’s usize conflates address, data, and object…
3768
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
3769
#lang Lua
I'm currently working on a macOS app that's built with Racket and allows the user to write small scripts to process and filter some data. While Racket is definitely my preferred language and I could easily use it for these scripts, my target audience for this app would probably appreciate a more familiar language. I…
3770
Arris / Arris-variant DSL/Fiber router critical vulnerability exposure
Cybersecurity researcher, entrepreneur, and engineer.
3771
3772
Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2020 and 2021?
I have done a few previous blog posts on who has contributed to PostgreSQL , but I did not do one last year. A couple people mentioned to me...
3773
Master Foo and the Recruiter (2016)
A technical recruiter, having discovered that that the ways of Unix hackers were strange to him, sought an audience with Master Foo to learn more about the Way. Master Foo met the recruiter in the HR offices of a large firm.
3774
Sending notifications programmatically: let me count the ways
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
3775
Tolkien’s Little-Known Original Drawings for the First Edition of “The Hobbit”
A lively new look at one of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time.
3776
Against Pair Programming
Pair programming is where two programmers work together on a single computer. One writes the code, while the other observes and offers suggestions. I'm not talking about debugging or brainstorming together, but this p...
3777
The AI war and how to win it
The battle for the future of the world
3778
3779
Fortran is easy to learn
Some may think Fortran is an archaic language, and certainly not one that should be taught, but in any respects modern Fortran is an exceptionally good language to teach programming in. Certainly b…
3780
