Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.
I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 4 years old: ever since, I’ve put them on as soon as I wake up and take them off just before I flop into bed. In all that time, I’ve never broken a pair of glasses, but I still get a new pair every 2 years: sometimes the frame starts to fall apart, but more often the quality of…
We're closing in on the end of 2021 and I'm as excited now about building websites as I've been in ~25 years.
What China’s jet engine program tells us about the limits of industrial policy
I recently came up with a "clever" idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don't fall victim in the future.
What if everyone's wrong?
Libra is less about an immediate benefit to Facebook, and more about creating a world where companies like Facebook have the best chance to prosper. That is why Facebook gave up so much control.
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
When you own a short email address at a popular email provider, you are bound to get gobs of spam, and more than a few alerts about random people trying to seize control over the account. If your account name is short and desirable enough, this kind of activity can make the account less reliable for day-to-day…
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
Apple’s Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. The deeper failure is an industry shipping more software while producing fewer engineers capable of fixing it.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Some applications, such as todo lists, need to maintain a user-defined order of items. The challenge is that the order is arbitrary and can change when the user rearranges items:
A few days ago, I started watching Person of Interest, and I haven’t been able to stop. Aside from the fact that the show feels even more relevant today than...
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the…
Since the 1940s, electric guitarists, keyboardists, and other instrumentalists have been using effects pedals, devices that modify the sound of the original audio source. Typical effects include distortion, compression, chorus, reverb, and delay. Early effects pedals consisted of basic analog circuits, often along…
Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It ...
The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in...
In the past, the various professions were organized as guilds. If you wanted to become a cabinet maker you’d enter into an apprenticeship arrangement with a ‘master’ cabinetmaker and you’d be taught the tricks of the trade over a several year period. As your final examination you would be required to make a…
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...
As work slowed down during the last couple of weeks of 2024, I decided to redirect some of my energy to hobbies instead of work. One such hobby is StarCraft: Brood War (or BW for short), a classic, highly competitive RTS from '98 that still has an active community today.
about me
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
I asked Google Gemini a pretty basic developer question. The answer was unremarkable, apart from it mentioning in conclusion that it knows I previously used ...
