Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a…
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] At around 7PM on the balmy evening of Saturday, December 3, 2022 , nearly every electric customer in Moore County, North Carolina was simultaneously plunged into darkness. Amid the confusion, the power utility was quick to di
I have recently received a job offer to work on a blockchain implementation. While the offer was very generous, I had to turn it down. In this post I want to collect the thoughts that went into my decision process leading to this conclusion.
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers.
When I placed the last screw on the DB4 chassis of the Beautiful Silent PC [1] , I thought I would not have to open it up again for years. Perhaps, I hypothesized, it would be a decade before an upgrade. The beautiful silent PC. The imperative of working from home proved me wrong when the seemingly easy problem of…
By James Kwak I spent the past two days at a financial regulation conference in Washington (where I saw more BlackBerries than I have seen in years—can’t lawyers and lobbyists afford decent p…
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings…
Andrew Vos's personal site
Laughing All The Way To Peace, Harmony, and Focus
Building agents with LLM (large language model) as its core controller is a cool concept. Several proof-of-concepts demos, such as AutoGPT, GPT-Engineer and BabyAGI, serve as inspiring examples. The potentiality of LLM extends beyond generating well-written copies, stories, essays and programs; it can be framed as a…
Making the claim “users want control” is the same as saying you don’t know what users want, you don’t know what is good, and you don’t know what their goals are.
The first in a series of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal
Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons. The resulting pages are easy to host, fast and extremely low on maintenance while being sufficient for many use cases. As I learned when setting up my blog , writing a simple script myself is faster and more satisfying than learning one of the other site builders…
In my view, wget is not a curl competitor. It is a companion tool that has a feature overlap with curl. Use the tool that does the job. Getting the job done is the key. If that means using wget instead of curl, then that is good and I don't mind. Why would I? To … Continue reading The curl-wget Venn diagram →
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Fin Moorhouse's website
Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner…
Lotus is a complete web framework for Ruby with a strong emphasis on object oriented design and testability. If you use it, you employ less DSLs and more objects, zero monkey-patching, separation of concerns between MVC layers. Each library is designed to be small, fast and testable.
Compare 30 global public DNS resolvers by privacy, filtering, DNSSEC, DoH, DoT, DoQ, IPv6, and jurisdiction, and benchmark DoH speed from your browser.
A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!
Convincing yourself that following more famous people online will lead to a better life is dangerous. You're simply wasting your time.
How do you condense a 30 minute talk in 5 minutes? Should you even try? These are the questions I struggled with when someone nudged me to register for the lightning talks. My talk was 30 minute long because I was to jump in if a last-minute incident would prevent someone to get on stage. Call me the backup speaker…
