691
Fixing annoying blue standby lights
A simple and free fix for those annoying over bright blue standby lights on home electronics (TV, Stereo, Set top box, etc.)
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
692
Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
Script for highlighting large videos in iCloud and a storage discrepancy
693
Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated
Most developers know about WebSockets, but Server-Sent Events (SSE) offer a simpler, often overlooked alternative that deserves more attention
694
Whence '\n'?
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
695
Write Your Own Virtual Machine (2022)
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
696
The "email is authentication" pattern
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
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698
CrowdStrike will be liable for damages in France, based on the OVH precedent
Hello, Today I am doing a quick post to cover the recent CrowdStrike incident that is estimated to have disabled 8.5M computers and caused more than $5.4B in damages since last week. Now a common q…
699
They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
700
I sped up serde_json strings by 20%
I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for…
701
Managing my motivation as a solo dev
One of the biggest sticking points of being a solo dev is maintaining motivation. I’ve been keeping a journal entry about how to hack my motivation, what works and what doesn’t. Here are the things that have worked. Convert external sources to motivation I’ve always known that I’m more extrinsically than intrinsically…
702
Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
703
A Canadian payroll dependency chart
Unfortunately, like most aspects of the tax system, this steadily increases in complexity, and this year with the Canada Pension Plan including not just "base" premiums and "additional" premiums but also "second additional premiums", I needed to rewrite my spreadsheet from scratch; and also very unfortunately, the…
704
What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.
705
The "missing" graph datatype already exists. It was invented in the '70s
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type ( HN ) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first.
706
Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs
The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 and BSDCan 2025 - Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.
707
We shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size
We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. Using some new changes to the git client it went from 178GB to 5GB.
708
I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig
The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…
709
What I think about when I edit (2019)
I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.
710
How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
711
How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?
Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…
712
A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
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714
So long WordPress
This has been a hard post for me to write after participating in WordPress since before I even started a career in tech and, until 3 months ago, for my entire tech career. That said, it has been in the making for quite a while now and it is time that I make it official. I’ve officially left the WordPress project after…
715
10 > 64, in QR Codes
QR codes reverse the usual order: decimal works better than base64 for encoding binary data, despite it requiring many more digits.
716
My Python code is a neural network
This post translates a Python program to a recurrent neural network. It visualizes the network and explains each step of the translation in detail.
717
Home Screen Advantage
Cupertino's attempt to scuttle Progressive Web Apps under cover of chaos is exactly what it appears to be: a shocking attempt to keep the web from ever emerging as a true threat to the App Store and blame regulators for Apple's own malicious choices. By hook or by crook, Apple's going to maintain its home screen…
718
I moved my blog from IPFS to a server
Why did an IPFS+ENS websites pioneer like me moved his blog from IPFS to a regular server?
719
A distributed systems reading list
An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals
720
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…