Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
Recently, we told you that California pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Bob Duggan — a man currently worth $2.3 billion — had, through an agent, complained to Google about a story we wrote about him.
When I was young, I had a piggy bank. A piggy bank is incredibly secure. It's fairly big - so it is hard to lose. It is brightly coloured - so you can find it easily. No one else can see how much money there is in there. The only way to get money out is to smash it - providing visible evidence if someone has robbed…
It finally happened!
And lies cause waste
A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box. The m1 mac mini, still wrapped in plastic. Apple is not … Continue reading An m1 for…
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
Another year, another Apple iOS/iPadOS/MacOS release, right? But shortly before the iOS 16 betas dropped, Apple made an interesting announcement.
Prior attempts to calculate Starlink’s potential for service have been theoretical. We simulate based on the actual constellation.
The SMBC comic Convert included as the “Votey button” a challenge to extract a Waldo visual from the digits of π.
And other lessons learned from creating a popular open-source project (JSON5)
Like many others in the open source community, I was very intrigued by the idea of the Framework laptop , a modular laptop designed to be repairable and upgradable. With a bunch of designs, schematics and documentation released as open source and a product that's legitimately competitive with the proprietary…
Reflecting on my work on Chrome.
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
I show toy implementations of Python decorator patterns that may be useful for Data Scientists.
Computational Biologist + Designer + more
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
When programming, we often need to write 'generic' functions where the exact data type is not important. For example, you might want to write a simple function that sums up numbers. Go lacked this notion until recently, but it was recently added (as of version 1.18). So I took it out for a spin. In … Continue reading…
Travel, books, politics, history and opinionating on life in Taiwan.
Friction Between Product and Engineering; Lack of trust and collaboration slowing down product growth
A debugging story about a mysterious C# gzip decompression exception and what actually caused it, with investigation steps and lessons learned.
UI design patterns for web apps: 1) Use defaults; 2) Obvious settings; 3) Show progress; 4) Don’t interrupt; 5) Flat hierarchy
I’ve done plenty of these, when I wanted to switch half my brain off but still do something time-consuming and fiddly, but still kind of productive. Very therapeutic!
