961
Serialization Is the Secret
If a value mutates in the forest with no one to see it, does it really mutate?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
962
Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
963
Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
Speedrunning A11y in SwiftUI
964
Misunderstanding about the details of how Apply Pay works
Apple Pay is great, but I think there is some misunderstanding out there about the details of how it works.
965
XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams
Some timezone observations on the recently discovered backdoor hidden in an xz tarball.
966
Bus Number – The GitHub plugin my coworkers asked me not to write
This blog post was written together with <mclare> , who made coooool visualizations like the picture at the end of the post!
967
Japan's Comfort Food: The Onigiri
Walk into any Japanese convenience store and you will always find a shelf dedicated to one item: onigiri. The onigiri, often translated as “rice ball”, literally means “grasping a fistful” and is in many ways Japan's original fast food, before fast food. Quick to make, quick to eat, easy
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I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
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970
Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
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A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll
973
So thieves broke into your storage unit again
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
974
tolower() with AVX-512
A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.
975
Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
976
ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
It’s a hellish time: prices for basic consumer goods are tripl e what they were last year. Your employer just paid your salary in eggs instead of money. There are daily shootouts between rival gangs. 🎵 Your love life’s DOA… 🎵
977
What I learned selling my company
At my first company, I internalized the standard advice to never think about M&A. The consensus was, and is, to just keep growing the business and good things will come. I did that, and I was lucky that good things did come in the form of a $130M acquisition
978
Useful Uses of cat
When I write shell one-liners that transform the contents of some file, they often look something like
979
Unusual Raku Features
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
980
Mario Maker 2 API
Mario Maker 2 API, created Thursday, February 10, 2022
981
Marginalia: 3 Years
It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A great number of…
982
Multiple Displays on a Mac Sucks
So many people I’ve worked with have used multiple displays – typically a matched pair side-by-side – and sworn by them. It’s always mystified me, to be honest.
983
Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ
After getting to work on some personal projects using Go+HTMX+Templ this year, I have decided to give up on using React on any personal projects. You can actually find a lot of compelling arguments for ditching React in favor of HTMX in the essays found in the HTMX official website. But I feel that not that many…
984
Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
985
The web's clipboard, and how it stores data of different types
Exploring the web’s clipboard APIs, their limitations, and their history.
986
Think more about what to focus on
Including me
987
The tragedy of running an old Node project
You want it to just work. But it resists.
988
The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
989
Facebook building subsea cable that will encompass the world
Facebook building subsea cable that will span the globe. Biggest project ever.
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