Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
I switched to ProtonMail a few years back after getting fed up with Google. It’s been mostly acceptable, but a few months ago the Android client started mangling emails – if I hit “send” too soon, it would send out only part of what I’d typed; I had to wait 10 seconds or so after I finished typing before hitting send…
Postcodes in the UK are pretty specific — a postcode such as “SE1 6AD” will often identify one or a few specific buildings, unlike countries where a postcode represents an entire neighbourhood. This leads to an interesting question: how short can you get an address and still have Royal Mail deliver post there? To…
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).
For my cousin’s wedding I did not make a photo booth but a video booth. - With an array of DSLRs to create a bullet time effect. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. Since this is a very visual project, you should really watch the video. This blog post contains the same info with more details, but those…
I'm leaving a comfortable job in a big city because there's more to life than whatever this is.
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string"Hello, World!" to the standard output?
Algebraic data types in Java.
Code linearity is more desireable than keeping abstraction layers separate.
I love GitHub Actions: I’ve been a daily user of it since 2019 for both professional and hobbyist projects, and have found it invaluable to both my overall productivity and peace of mind. I’m just old enough to have used Travis CI et al. professionally before moving to GitHub Actions, and I do not look back with joy 1…
By now, you have probably heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or any of the alternatives GPT-3, GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Facebook’s LLaMa or even Google’s Bard. They are artificial intelligence programs that can participate in a conversation. Impressively smart, they can easily be mistaken for humans, and are skilled in a…
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground up, including: a fast (~120fps) canvas-based editor component; multi-language syntax highlighting with Tree-sitter; snippets; a file browser; find-and-replace with regex and JavaScript expression support; and two completely new features: AST mode and…
Recreating the used bookstore experience via contrastive learning, t-SNE, and 100M book reviews.
Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian...
Via LinkedIn, I learned about an article called “The age of Agile must end” by Michael Burnett, and I’ve since seen it pop up again in…
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
Of the biggest tech companies, only Apple has not executed major job cuts. But why is this, and can we now expect it to follow suit by shedding workers?
Updated 10/25
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
I went on a small journey the last couple days to find the original Netscape Navigator “meteors” animation. This one has a special place in my head and heart because it is so clearly connected to my memories of discovering the web as a kid. Here it is in its original 60×60 px glory:
A full of spectrum of infringment
The FCC reached out to me and is asking all of you who signed the petition to also file a comment in their docketing system for the ATSC 3 petition. This is very easy to do and will just take a few minutes. So far there are only about a dozen or so complaints filed. … Continue reading The FCC Responds to my ATSC 3…
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
[Image: From Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe].While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of …
Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired…
