A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,387 posts.
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
[Jan 26, 7:25am]: Google has responded to this article and the plans for throttling: Unfortunately, our current implementation throttles...
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
My personal website and blog
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! ’19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesti…
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
I love to have Linux as my main OS. For someone who spends most of his time programming, writing HTML, writing LaTeX, and browsing the net, it is nearly a perfect tool. Packages are one "apt install" away. Mounting my website is one sshfs away and with private key authentication I don't even have to type my password…
The death of hardware store optimization.
Since I switched to Linux some time ago, I had my fair share of problems with running games on Linux. To be fair, most of these were not designed to run on linux, but the awesome Proton and its main project wine make it easy to run most games I am interested in seamlessly. Most of the time when problems arise, games…
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
PS4 downloads have a reputation of being very slow. I did some digging to find out the root cause, and was surprised.
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will…