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A Short Intro to Constraints
The essence of constraint is projection.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
1442
Fundamental Algorithms III
Three more fundamental algorithms in the series. Today, recursive permutations, subsets of the given set and variations with repetitions. Th...
1443
The soul of a new computer company
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle , we have started Oxide Computer Company .
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Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
I have long wanted to create my own desktop operating system targeting the Raspberry Pi. I believe we should have a hackable desktop environment that is both powerful and lightweight, similar to BeOS and the Amiga. To build this desktop we really need full control over how apps draw to the screen, but still have…
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How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
In a previous post I outlined why programmers should strive to be good at one thing rather than everything. In this post I discuss how to ...
1446
On me, and the Media Lab
(Please be sure to read the addendum at the end of this post.) A week ago last Friday, I spoke to Joi Ito about the release of documents that accuse Media Lab co-founder Marvin Minsky of involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes.* Joi told me that evening that the Media Lab’s ties to Epstein went… Read More »On…
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80% of the Web Powered by PHP (2017)
Today, PHP is used by more than 80% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Slack, Etsy, Cloudflare,
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Hyphenation in CSS
Automatic hyphenation on the web has been possible since 2011 and is now broadly supported. There is however far more control available to designers than just turning on hyphens. Updated January 2023.
1450
ET Don't Phone Home
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
1451
Literally Suffocating in Meeting Rooms, A Little
A special thing we do at work because I asked for it is that we have CO2 monitors in the meeting rooms. These measure the levels of CO2 levels in the air. In...
1452
Preparing for 25 Years
On October 7, this blog will have existed and been continually updated for 25 years.
1453
How Not to Acknowledge a Data Breach
I’m not a huge fan of stories about stories, or those that explore the ins and outs of reporting a breach. But occasionally I feel obligated to publish such accounts when companies respond to a breach report in such a way that it’s crystal clear they wouldn’t know what to do with a data breach if it bit them in the…
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Strategies for Long Projects
I’m in the middle of three multi-month to a year projects right now: Writing a book Running a marathon Building a ...
1455
Logistic Regression from Bayes’ Theorem
In this post we’ll explore how we can derive logistic regression from Bayes’ Theorem. Starting with Bayes’ Theorem we’ll work our way to computing the log odds of our problem and the arrive at the inverse logit function. After reading this post you’ll have a much stronger intuition for how logistic
1456
Shipping a compiler every six weeks
This blog post is a slightly edited version of the live transcript of the talk I gave at RustFest 2019 in Barcelona on November 10th, 2019. As it's a transcript some parts of it are a bit repetitive or badly worded, but I hope the message behind the talk will be conveyed by this post anyway.
1457
Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don't Matter
Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. Also, allow me to argue with myself for a moment: banks shouldn't have these restrictions in place anyway. I want to put forward cases for
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Rsync, GUIs, power, control, design, and decisions
I spent last weekend making a GUI for rsync (and this past week tidying it up a bit) and I learned a lot about rsync, GUIs, design, power, control, and decisions around verbosity and freedom of choice versus simplicity and guidance/support, packaging, maintenance and support.
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Comparisons in C++20
Now that the Cologne meeting is over and we’ve more or less finalized (at least before the NB comments come in) C++20, I wanted to take the time to describe in detail one of the new language features we can look forward to. The feature is typically referred to as operator<=> (defined in the language as “three-way…
1460
How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea
1461
State of Industrial Control Systems in Poland and Switzerland
TL;DR New update for Kamerka allows to map Industrial Control Systems of whole country. As in previous version, interactive map is created…
1462
Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
1463
Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
1464
The Internet and the Third Estate
Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a “Fifth Estate”; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters…
1465
Performance Tuning for .NET Core
Some of you may know I've been spending whatever time I can scrounge together grinding away at a new serialization library for .NET. Serializers can be complicated beasts. They have to be reliable, flexible, and fast beyond reproach. I won't convince you that serialization libraries have to be quick — in this post…
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A New R6RS Scheme Compiler
Some readers already know this and a few have suspected. I’ve been working on a new R6RS Scheme compiler for a while. Now I have released it as free software. Read on to learn the many wonderful drawbacks of this niche compiler.
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The sad state of font rendering on Linux
As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic. If you don’t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost. Thanks.
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How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch
Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that
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