Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.
A while back, I worked on a RISC-V-based userspace simulator for fun. In doing so, taught myself a lot more than I wanted to know about what happens in-between when the Kernel is asked to run a program, and when the first line of our program’s main function is actually executed. Here’s a summary of that rabbit hole.
I’m excited to share a 3 state, 3 symbol Turing Machine that cannot be proven to halt or not (when starting on a blank tape) without solving a Collatz-like problem. Therefore, solving the \(BB(3, 3)\) problem is at least as hard as solving this Collatz-like problem, a class of problem for which Paul Erdős famously…
Another privacy nightmare. An airline wants its cabin crew to know your birthday and favourite drinks order, to better personalise its service to you. My first instinct is to recoil in horror. It sounds like every dystopian sci-fi epic. But why do I feel this way? Partly it is the lack of genuine personality behind…
This map is now available in app form! WiFox is available on the App Store and Google Play. Finding an open wireless connection in many airports isn't always easy, or possible, without a password (or local phone number which is stupid). The difficulty of getting online is why I asked you for and created an…
Evan briefly discusses rss
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
I’ve used MongoDB for over a year at scale at both Heyzap and Bugsnag and I’ve found it to be a very capable database. As with all databases, there are some gotchas, and here is a summary of the things I wish someone had told me earlier.
I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is both an obvious way to teach programming and almost certainly a wrong way to teach…
Discover how advanced deep learning technologies offer revolutionary screen privacy solutions in the workplace. Learn to safeguard your digital space with ease.
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
My Sidekiq project isn’t just about building the best background processing framework for Ruby, it’s also a venue for me to experiment with ways to make open source software financially sustainable for the developers who work on it hundreds of hours each year (e.g. me). Let’s review.
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
As your database grows and scales there are some operations that you need to take more care of than you did when you were just starting. When working with your application in your dev environment you may not be fully aware of the cost of some operations until you run them against production. And at some point most of…
Some connections between things, which I have not seen elsewhere. Maybe they mean something?
From missing real fireflies to learning basic electronics and building my own blinking "fireflies"
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
Several holidays ago, I got a bee in my bonnet and wrote a fast JSON parser whose parsed AST fits in a single contiguous block of memory. The code was small and simple and the performance was generally on-par with RapidJSON, so I stopped and moved on with my life.
Learn how to use OpenCV in the web without a lot of headaches.
It's not often that you find yourself staring at code that few people have ever seen, code that was an important part in bringing down the a...
In 2022, David Guillot delivered an inspiring DjangoCon Europe talk , showcasing a web app that looked and felt as dynamic as a React app. Yet he and his team had done something bold. They converted it from React to HTMX , cutting their codebase by almost 70% while significantly improving its capabilities.
The other week I spent some time visiting friends in San Francisco. I’ve been going to SF on and off every year for about ten years now. However on this journey, the weirdness of the city a…
