Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
I don't think I've ever had more distrust and as a consequence distate for software than in recent years. I don't think its just me as a tech-nerd with artisanal tech-carpentry aspirations. I want people to build well, treat their users right and generally exercise some actual restraint. I see it very clearly and I…
This is not a competition, is just to show how to use the hardware with relative efficiency, being the idea is to show something collaborative rather than competitive.
Designs for a quieter, more energy efficient purifier, and data proving it really works.
There have been several allegations of this since the handover of the Freenode infrastructure to its new custodians, but I can now provide a first-hand account of one incident — because I am the victim of it.
`atan2f` is an important but slow trigonometric function. In this article we'll explain how to approximate it, and implement a version 50x faster than `glibc` on batches of inputs.
When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it's not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn't have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out…
Recently I've become more and more interested in how WebRTC works, so a few weeks ago I decided to add a page to my website where I could set up peer-to-peer video chats. There are plenty of libraries and services out there to make this extremely easy, but knowing that WebRTC is now well supported natively across…
Over the last month, there has been a ton of debate and conversation about web2 vs web3 with many leading voices raising doubts about web3. Debate and doubt are healthy. And web3 enthusiasts, particularly on Twitter, remind me of missionaries trying to recruit the unwashed to their belief system. Frankly, it is all…
Ten years ago I would have considered myself someone who was excited about new technology. I always had the latest smartphone, I would read the reviews of new…
How to save the open web, & get (re)started with RSS
My idea of a vacation might be weird to some. Sure, I like sunshine, I like beaches – but more than all that, I like making stuff with computers.
I met John Paragon, Jambi the genie on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, at the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings, where both our careers started. He was sly and wickedly funny. We became best friends instantly. In a group of exceptionally talented and […]
Three simple tricks product I’ve picked up that help me be more than completely useless when I need to wear a Product hat.
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
By avoiding effect aware functions a language hobbles engineers and makes programs sloppier than they could be.
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
So it’s borderline useless for all but the simplest use cases, and even there it does a very subpar job. I’d like to have an inline image every now and then, or organize things in some multi-column layouts or the like, or a table. 19th century newspapers could do this, and if your technology can’t emulate typography…
The scientific reason, explained
What happens when 70 million people visit your joke site?
Microsoft today released another round of security updates for Windows operating systems and supported software, including fixes for six zero-day bugs that malicious hackers already are exploiting in active attacks.
While this post is addressed to F# .NET developers, it introduces much wider concepts starting from hardware architecture to overall .NET runtime and JIT compiler optimizations. It shouldn't be a surprise - optimizing the application performance requires us to understand the relationships between our high level code…
Facebook’s reorganization into Meta is the ultimate bet on the power of founder control.
Last week, I described a use-case for a custom Stream Collector. I received a intriguing comment on Twitter: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/Miguucm/status/1389258245886390292' Hats off to you, Miguel! Your comment revealed a method I didn’t know! So I decided to investigate…
Deep underneath South Kensington tube station, a huge project is underway to replace all five of the station's escalators, and all of them at the same time.
