17851
Treasure trove of mechanical animations (2015)
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,221 posts.
17852
How to read a mathematics textbook (2016)
Reading maths textbooks linearly doesn't work; here's what to do instead.
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Getting started with linear algebra
I'd like to introduce a series of blog posts and their corresponding Python Notebooks gathering notes on the Deep Learning Book from Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua B...
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My favorite tools and techniques for procedural gamedev
An overview of some of my favorite shaders, algorithms, and techniques I use to aid my work in procedural gamedev and 3D scenes. It focuses particularly on things that can be added or mixed in to enhance non-procedural scenes.
17858
Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0
This week I published the first alpha release of Datasette 1.0, with a significant new feature: Datasette core now includes a JSON API for creating and dropping tables and inserting, …
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17860
Reasons the MI6 Story Is a Lie
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by…
17861
Booz Allen ticketmastered America’s public lands
An arms dealer makes millions on junk fees from National Parks visitors.
17862
Lobotomizing Gnome
I have pretty basic needs from my desktop. I do 99% of my work using just three programs: a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox. I don't want a lot of bells and whistles in my desktop, and I really just want it to get out of the way so I can do my work.
17863
Time to end the speed limit in US airspace?
It's time to end the speed limit in US airspace
17864
Shopify Is Illegal in Germany
In einem konkreten Fall hat die Datenschutzbehörde die Nutzung von Shopify, bzw. der verwendeten Dienste für rechtswidrig erklärt.
17865
C++23: Removing garbage collection support
If we go through the list of C++23 features, we can stumble upon the notion of garbage collection twice. Once among the language and once among the library features. Both entries refer to the same paper (P2186R2): garbage collection (GC in short) support is getting removed from C++. Just to make it clear, it’s not…
17866
How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
17867
Not all TLDs are Created Equal
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban , the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole…
17868
Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs.
17869
Tmux is worse-is-better
tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to…
17870
Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners
Product Owner: Hey, how long do you believe Feature F will take? Developer: Idk. We haven’t even started working on it and it’s bound to stir up some old issues.
17871
Another go at Go failed
After a considerable gap, a gave Go another go! The Problem As part of a consulting engagement, I accepted a project to devel...
17872
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
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Fable and the end of the free lunch
Fable’s price ended the free lunch of ever-cheaper frontier models. Now we have to think about which model gets which work.
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How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
The economics behind where movies are filmed, why Hollywood left Los Angeles, and whether audiences can tell the difference.
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How to stop functional programming
You go into work and discover that a coworker isn't happy with some code you wrote because they don't understand it. They go to your manager and tell them that you're being a problem by writing code they don't understand. Your manager, being very skilled in conflict resolution, makes a technical decision to avoid…
17878
The death of the PCIe expansion card
With the AM5 platform from AMD on the horizon, five major motherboard manufacturers have annonced their flagship motherboards with the X670E chipset. Some of them are having fun with this generation’s multi-faceted step into “five”: AM5, PCIe Gen 5.0, DDR5, 5nm process, boost clocks over 5GHz, you catch the drift. But…
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Why I’m not leaving Python for Go
First of all, Go seems like a great language. It has an excellent tutorial which I joyfully went through and found: Go is Fast. Concurrent by design. Typed (important for JIT and IDE’s) but n…
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GPT makes learning fun again
What will GPT unlock for the nerdy kid sitting in a 7th-grade classroom today?