Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,216 posts.
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
This article aims to subdue the rumors that Safari 14 will block Google Analytics (and other similar libraries) by default. It will not.
Parallax scrolling – creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene by having the background and foreground move at different speeds – is pretty much a staple of platformers and other 2D g…
Hi! It feels like I did one of these posts just the other day, but it was a month ago? Time sure does fly… Since there’s a round number in the title of this blog post, perhaps I should …
Where noise hides when deep neural networks generalize.
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…
In which I push browser engines to their finite limits using infinite values.
Today, we’re going to look at the many ways of implementing user-to-kernel transitions on x86, i.e. system calls. Let’s first quickly review what system calls actually need to accomplish.
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
μWWVB is a watch stand that automatically sets the time on atomic wristwatches where regular WWVB signal isn't available.
I turned a forest trail near my apartment into a playable neural world. You can explore that world in your web browser by clicking right here :
I have recently looked at Julia , a new programming language developed at MIT that promises to be a dynamic programming language that is sui...
I made this today while experimenting with cellular automata parameters , and I found it uniquely beautiful. After a while the patterns stabilise and start to look like a kind of constantly-moving circuit diagram. I call it Chip . The source is on GitHub if you're that way inclined.
We sill start off by walking though the different parts of a GIF file. (The information on this page is primarily drawn from the W3C GIF89a specification .) A GIF file is made up of a bunch of different "blocks" of data. The following diagram shows all of the different types of blocks and where they belong in the…
That’s the title of RFC 7258 , also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for “Best Current Practice”); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people’s use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is…
This post is my attempt to write an easy to understand introduction to the main ideas behind building a real-time col...
Make your own AI by hand ✍️ exercises
The following notes represent a complete, stand alone interpretation of Stanford's machine learning course presented by Professor Andrew Ng and originally posted on the ml-class.org website during the fall 2011 semester. The topics covered are shown below, although for a more detailed summary see lecture 19. The code…
Noise is an indispensable tool for creative coding. We use it to generate all kinds of organic effects like clouds, landscapes and contours. Or to move and distort objects with a more lifelike behaviour.
I have heard this sentence many times in my life, always in the workplace. This puzzles me as I pride myself on seeking out things I am wrong about and learn...
I hope everyone in the States had a fantastic Thanksgiving (even if you’re a Dallas Cowboys football fan).
Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry
How many Seattleites can walk to fulfill their daily needs?
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
The GPS pioneer took direct hits from Apple (iPhone, Watch) and Google (Maps). But huge R&D investment helped turn the company from an automotive GPS firm to a leader in fitness watches and trackers.
