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Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,224 posts.
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What My PhD Was Like
What it looks like to do a PhD: the view from my desk. Recently, I have been talking to many prospective Computer Science PhD students ...
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Delisted Overnight: A Cautionary Tale for Indie iOS Developers
How my app’s keywords mysteriously disappeared from search results and downloads were slashed by 44%
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The 39th Root of 92
My new office space suffers from a shortage of photons, so I’ve been wiring up light fixtures. As I was snaking 14-gauge cable through the ceiling cavity, I began to wonder: Why is it called 14-gauge? I know that the gauge specifies the size of the copper conductors, but how exactly? The number can’t be a simple…
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Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed
If you are Esquire's web designer, please find another career. Stop. Stop hurting the internet. I am still constantly amazed at the level user-hostility -- actually outright contempt -- in mobile web design. Remember in the 90s when those oh-so-clever web sites would pop up little Javascript dialogs trying to better…
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Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
In the summer of 2020, I took a 3 months sabbatical in order to finish an album. The experience deeply transformed how I make music – I now know I can make ...
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Unpredictable black boxes are terrible interfaces
Why generative AI tools can be so difficult to use and how we might improve them
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Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code wr…
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Tips for beginning systems and software engineers
From time to time I’m toying with the idea to give a lecture to newcomers in the IT industry (systems or software engineers). Here are some of the points that I would include in it: Human fa…
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I'd not buy a LG monitor
There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG's latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default…
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Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
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The App Store Nightmare
Edit: The specific error message I was getting is a bug in the App Store relating to disabling SpotLight on your Mac. Once this was fixed, apps from my Swedish region again started updating on the …
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Use Haskell for shell scripting
turtle 1.0 announcement post
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Flow-Based Programming
Official website for flow-based programming
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Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status
I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and …
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How I Use Notion
This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app) to organise various aspects of my life: project management, reading, academics, plans/goals, investing, and more. The post is not designed to be read linearly – pick and choose the bits that are relevant to…
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What is a black start of the power grid?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] November 1965 saw one of the most widespread power outages in North American history. On the freezing cold evening of the 9th, the grid was operating at maximum capacity as people tried to stay warm when a misconfigured relay tr
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Goodbye, Node.js Buffer
It’s time to move from Buffer to Uint8Array.
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AWS Java documentation is fucked
Update: Eron Hennessey from Amazon has responded below with a new updated Java SDK that’s much easier to grok. The title of this article has since been changed accordingly. The problem…
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General Theory of Neural Networks
From gene regulatory networks to artificial neural networks
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Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
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ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
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Category Theory Illustrated – Natural Transformations
I didn’t invent categories to study functors; I invented them to study natural transformations. — Saunders Mac Lane
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The Two Egg Problem
Analysis of the classic "dropping two eggs from a building" interview question