13321
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
13322
13323
13324
Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020272 points68 commentscited by 20History & Retro Computing details
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
13325
A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history
Every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards, it's probably a unique order, never before seen in human history.
13326
Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
13327
How Do We Learn?
Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the difference? by Edith Ackermann (PDF)
13328
The story of my home made pipe organ (2000)
As the course progressed, I discovered that some of this stuff was actually logical, and also kind of fun. I found myself using the piano room just to play around. I never cared much for attempting to play sheet music, but the idea of hitting keys and getting a sound that was sometimes harmonious was strangely…
13329
Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
13330
Mozilla's low-overhead open source replay debugger
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
13331
Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics of Magic Windows
I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It’s a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.
13332
Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?
On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844 , aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and…
13333
The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
Why did mental health fall off a cliff at the same time and in the same way in the USA, The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? Part 1 of 3.
13334
Japan has changed in important and visible ways
The 2020s are not the 1990s.
13335
The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)
This article is part of a 3-part series on trimodal compensation: * Part 1: The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021, this article) * Part 2: The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (2024, this article) * Part 3: The trimodal nature of tech compensation in
13336
Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
13337
Is Web3 anything?
The term “web3” seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Given that it’s a decentralized group describing a decentralized movement, that lack of focus isn’t exactly surprising. Almost by definition it’s going to end up being different things to different people.
13338
13339
No Recent Automation Revolution
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
13340
Rewrite It in Rails
In 2022 I started building an application for creating Customs declarations. After evaluating some options and writing code in various programming languages ...
13341
13342
Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX
Dec 14, 2020 I’ve been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google’s GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other p
13343
Learning The Elite Class
my experience at fancy parties
13344
I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
13345
The Last Technical Interview
Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s…
13346
Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)
The story of how I wrote a leak-free, thread-safe grep in C23 without shooting yourself in the foot, and how you can too! Introduction Let's be honest: mos...
13347
Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
13348
Aaron Swartz's Thoughts on djb (2009)
I think it’s time to remind people that D. J. Bernstein is the greatest programmer in the history of the world.
13349
Yagni
Yagni ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") is the principle that we should not build presumptive features. It should not be used as a justification for neglecting internal quality.
13350
Go is amazing, period.
I've been messing around with Go for quite some time now and I wanted to share my experiences. When I first looked at Go, I put it aside a...