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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
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A requiem for amateur chemistry
Bidding farewell to classic experiments.
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An immutable operating system
A post by August Lilleaas, published February 02, 2014.
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OS X Mountain Lion: Data Loss via 'Save As'
Update Dec 20, 2012 : Apple appears to have fixed this in a way by adding a “Keep changes in original document” checkbox in the save dialog. Bandaids are better than nothing. It is also possible to add a keyboard shortcut for Save As, which is partially hidden (option key).
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LibGen's Bloat Problem
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…
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Why I self host my servers and what I've recently learned
A short story on why I still go through the effort of self hosting servers and some things it taught me recently.
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Why long-term plans don't work and how to fix them
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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Retro nostalgia and why my new website looks like Window 9x (2019)
For a while I’ve been wanting to update my website, but I’m really not a designer and I knew any attempts to improve on what I already had would be a haphazard mess.
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GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)
GPT-2 is a direct scale-up of GPT-1 , with more parameters and trained on more data. However, it was deemed too dangerous to release by OpenAI:
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Cat Litter Boxes and DRM
I bought a litter box and involuntarily signed up to a never ending subscription service.
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Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
Previously on my quest for fast rendering of 2D vector graphics on GPU, I have posted a piet-gpu update and a deeper exploration into a sort-middle architecture. These intermediate results showed promise, but fell short of my vision for truly high performance 2D GPU rendering.
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The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
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Designing Electronics That Work
I’ve put together a 300+ page book with basically everything I learned the hard way over the last 10 years founding and working at several hardware startups. It started out as a self published work, but No Starch Press picked it up and it went through a very extensive editing process to make it even better.
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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
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Git in six hundred words
(This essay is a companion piece to Gitlet, my implementation of Git in JavaScript.)
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Automating processes with software is hard
We have decades of experience trying to automate processes. My biggest lesson is that automation is not about the easy and known flow, but about exception handling.
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Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
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Remote Code Execution in Alpine Linux
tl;dr I found several bugs in apk, the default package manager for Alpine Linux. Alpine is a really lightweight distro that is very commonly used with Docker...
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The most difficult CEO skill: managing your own psychology
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents
Welcome to the digital home of Daniel Ball. Explore my portfolio to see the projects I’ve worked on and learn more about my professional journey.
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Decoding James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope probably needs no introduction, since it is perhaps the most important and well-known mission of the last years. It was launched on Christmas day from Kourou, French Guiana , into a direct transfer orbit to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point . JWST uses S-band at 2270.5 MHz to transmit…
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Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old
How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy
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Design is compromise
Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. It’s finding the right balance between two competing ...
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What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
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Google Took Down My Chrome Extension for Using Lodash
So there I was, happily closing out some tabs before heading to bed, when I noticed a new email from the Chrome Web Store at 12:30am: I went to Intention's…