Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,224 posts.
Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…
Monkey the cat hunts for his dinner using an Arduino powered cat feeder.
Fizz Buzz is a counting game that has become oddly popular in the world of computer programming as a simple test of basic programming skills. The rules of the game are straightforward. Players say the numbers aloud in order beginning with one. Whenever a number is divisible by 3, they say 'Fizz' instead. If it is…
In case you are not yet familiar with why an initramfs (or initrd, or initial ramdisk) is typically used when starting Linux, let me quote the wikipedia definition: “[…] initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process […] to make…
A while ago I decided to figure out how to prove one of Ramanujan’s formulas. I feel this is the sort of thing every mathematician should try at least once. I picked the easiest one I could f…
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
A simple spectrometer can be built from a CD and a box. Cut a slit on one side of the box. Place the CD on the other side with about 60 degree angle. Look down into the openning on the box. The slit should not be too wide, otherwise the spectrum lines will be blurred. It should not be too narrow either, otherwise the…
I recall saying to one of my colleagues at Atari way back in 1982 that I wanted to make a game that would be genuine art. A year later I built a game that was my first experiment in that direction: Gossip. It was a ridiculously simple game in which a player attempted to win favor in a group by calling people and…
Blog about linguistics, programming, and my projects
tl;dr Nonprofit/pro bono organizations I suggest for offering mentoring/seeking mentorship: Mentoring Club [https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/software-engineering] (experienced mentors, EU focus), Coding Coach [https://codingcoach.io/] (aimed at software engineers), Mentors in Tech…
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
Coati is a developer tool for fast and efficient source code navigation and exploration. This is the story of how an internship at Google…
git-flow is a library of git subcommands that helps automate your branching and release workflow workflow, using Vincent Driessen's successful branching model.
<p>As a fun personal project, I have been working on a chatbot for answering general questions about my household on anything from maintenance questions to doctor’s appointments. </p> <p> The general idea is that the chatbot will get its household knowledge through RAG from querying a vector database, but for better…
The sixtyforgan is a Commodore 64 equipped with a spring reverb, featuring the keyboard layout of a chromatic button accordion.
An odd post. Diatoms are single-celled algae with glass shells, and people arrange them into patterns under a microscope.
