Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
Scheme (and Lisp) lets you express complex systems and problem domains in simpler terms than any other language can. For all its brilliance, Haskell resists most of the attempts people make to just hack and write useful code quickly.
The story of one programmer’s journey into, and vehement rejection of, this thing we call “DevOps” – lessons learned, sound advice and why you’re probably doing it all…
Twenty-five years ago, I made my first donation to an open source project and purchased a CD with an operating system as downloading a few hundred megabytes over a 14.4kbps dial-up wasn't very fun.
The CAP Theorem is a fundamental theorem in distributed systems that states any distributed system can have at most two of the following three properties.
For the last 39 years, PostScript has been at the heart of the Mac, bringing desktop publishing, fonts, and the LaserWriter and other printers. It has been removed from Sonoma.
In November 2017, I deactivated my account on Facebook. I didn’t leave Facebook for moral reasons back then but more because it was starting to feel like a waste of time and valuable brain cy…
Dear Fellow Researchers, Would you kindly pay attention to the article “Non-Orthodox Combinatorial Models Based on Discordant Structures” by the author V. F. Romanov published on arXiv.…
Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan — a 13-year-old with an iPad app — sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
I heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll , as a reminder to all that you're reading a dead medium.
A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that “Informed Delivery,” a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and made it easier for…
I found myself going down a previously unexplored rabbit hole recently, or more specifically, what I thought was "a" rabbit hole but in actual fact was an ever-expanding series of them that led me to what I refer to in the title of this post as "6 rabbits deep"
Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.” I’m extremely grateful to see th…
A few months after writing up the Cudy AX3000 units and moving the house over to OpenWRT, I ended up revisiting the one bit I had deliberately waved away ...
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
To be fair, nobody asks me this exact question. But people have regularly asked why Isabelle dispenses with proof objects. The two questions are essentially the same, because proof objects are intrinsic to all the usual type theories. They are also completely unnecessary and a huge waste of space. As described in an…
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3 . I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap.
UPDATE March 28, 2013: Many people have commented here and emailed me that it no longer works for you. I have made an update to fix the bookmarklet for those with Facebook Graph Search. You can get…
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
Japanese candy subscription box Candy Japan exceeded $10,000 per month in sales.
We will explore how we can use an Android E-ink tablet (or any tablet) as a monitor for Linux computer
A brilliant project cleverly sabotages everyday objects to reveal how much we take for granted about them — and about the design process.
It was the familiar story of human cruelty and greed: the sperm whales were hunted to the oblivion. Then, in the 1970s, the better part of humanity led by good people - ecological activists - saw the error of their ways and stopped the murder. Good triumphed over evil. Amen. The problem with such…
While we were visiting the University of Maryland, we came across a fleet of electric scooters scattered across the campus and couldn't resist poking at the scooter's mobile app. To our surprise, our actions caused the horns and headlights on all of the scooters to turn on and stay on for 15 minutes straight.
AI dev tooling can do better than chat interfaces
Looking back on the last four years, what worked, what didn't.
How I'm using Kagi Search with low vision to manage visual fatigue, plus my favorite Kagi accessibility features for low vision + CVI and Kagi low vision theme
