Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
For some people, a 40-hour workweek is something to aspire to; for others, it’s still too much time taken up by a job. If you fall into that second category, if you want more time for hobbies, family and friends, or working on your own software projects, you too might dream of working less than full time. But how do…
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
If I were more musically talented I would be writing a song ♫ Arguments that are destructured, and operator characters combine-ed; Loop binding changes and convert redefine-ed… ♫ no none of that, please stop.
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
This week we discussed the IPFS whitepaper by Juan Benet in my Distributed Systems Seminar. Remember peer-to-peer systems? IPFS is "pe...
Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…
Shifting common knowledge on Saudi Arabia has infected the narrative around SoftBank's Vision Fund, which in turn places unicorn valuations at risk.
When Pieter Omvlee was tasked with designing a simple drawing application as part of his computer science class at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he set about creating a lightweight app that would fulfill his homework assignment. In the late 2000s, the vector drawing app market was a lot smaller than it…
Atlassian didn't jump through the standard hoops. Instead, they chose an unconventional path that would ultimately help them build a $10 billion business.
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
KPTI/KAISER Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions
Reading maths textbooks linearly doesn't work; here's what to do instead.
I'd like to introduce a series of blog posts and their corresponding Python Notebooks gathering notes on the Deep Learning Book from Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua B...
I have pretty basic needs from my desktop. I do 99% of my work using just three programs: a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox. I don't want a lot of bells and whistles in my desktop, and I really just want it to get out of the way so I can do my work.
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
A note in advance: This is absolutely not about Docker being too "opinionated" for me, or other tools being more flexible. I believe that learning and using Docker is just plain more complicated than learning and using the tools I describe below. Docker is genuinely more complex and harder to use than the…
Intel is in an increasingly bad position in part because it has been captive to its integrated model. Or, you could simply say they were disrupted.
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!!
Results from asking 180 YouTubers to make an unboxing video for a subscription box. Includes detailed breakdown of response rate, number of videos made, views and the sales results from them.
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
A case study on how compilers decouple components from each other using data.
The Keybase browser extension subverts the app's end-to-end encryption. Keybase considers that "an acceptable risk" and not worth fixing.
