1951
Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
1952
Semantic Zoom
Making a gestural, itemized environment more fluid
1953
From Stacks to Trees: A new aliasing model for Rust
Since last fall, Neven has been doing an internship to develop a new aliasing model for Rust: Tree Borrows. Hang on a second, I hear you say – doesn’t Rust already have an aliasing model? I...
1954
The Development of the C Language (2003)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
1955
Maxar's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
1956
The D.E.N.N.I.S. system: Résumé tips for Senior Devs
Swipe Right on Your Dream Job
1957
1958
Get a personal teacher
Want to learn something new? Get a personal teacher as soon as possible. If you don't have enough money to pay someone, find a mentor among your friends o...
1959
Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1960
Changing the Rules of Rust
In Rust, there are certain API decisions about what is and isn’t sound that impact all Rust code. That is, a decision was made to allow or not allow types which have certain safety requirements, and now all users are committed to that decision. They can’t just use a different API with different rules: all APIs must…
1961
WTF is going on with R7RS Large?
The reaction to John Cowan’s resignation as chair of the R 7 RS Large working group has been somewhat wider than I think anyone expected, making it onto general interest programming forums. Scheme may be a small island, but when it has an earthquake, it makes waves through the whole archipelago of programming…
1962
1963
Git commands you probably do not need
Ah, git ! Love it, hate it. Few things are as central to the modern software development workflow as source-control management (SCM) tools. Although there have been and still are plenty of alternatives to git in the world of SCMs, none other seem quite as prevalent both in open-source and the enterprise.
1964
Some notes on local-first development
How local-first software works: sync engines, CRDTs, replicated databases, developer tools, architecture tradeoffs, and when to use each approach.
1965
LuaX: A Lua Dialect with JSX
This site now runs on a custom dialect of Lua.
1966
Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Down Converter
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter . According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.”
1967
Writing a Simple Garbage Collector in C (2014)
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
1968
Prolog for data science
I demonstrate a widely applicable pattern which integrates Prolog as a critical component in a data science analysis. Analytic methods are used to generate properties about the data under study and Prolog is used to reason about the data via the generated properties. The post includes some examples of piece-wise…
1969
Prompt Engineering: Steer a large pretrained language model to do what you want
Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights. It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy…
1970
The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
1971
Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead
In the emerging age of AI generated code, is leetcode really the best way to evaluate technical candidates (was it ever)?
1972
The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
How did the company that aspired to be so much more come to this?
1973
You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
1974
Who wants to be tracked?
“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do value my own online privacy, and whenever I read that phrase as part of a website consent banner it sounds like lip service at best. Consent banners ostensibly exist to give users control over their data & personal privacy. Far…
1975
An unexpected benefit of unit tests
While I won’t go so far as to diagnose myself with ADD without consulting a doctor, those who know me know I can be distracted quite easily. So recently, I decided to do something a little different with a personal project I started a few weeks ago (link to come). I wrote unit tests. That may seem rather uninspired…
1976
The simplicity of single-file Golang deployments
Deploy Go apps as single static binaries with systemd. No Docker, no npm, zero-downtime via socket activation. Modern complexity is often unnecessary.
1977
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
1978
1979
MVC Isn’t MVC
In December of 1979 Tyrgve Reenskaug, an employee of Xerox PARC, published a paper called MODELS-VIEWS-CONTROLLERS about a design pattern he had invented for developing applications with a graphica…
1980
Kubernetes is hard
Recently, 37signals unveiled mrsk , a tool developed internally to ease with deployments of their services and an accompanying blog post which sparked a lengthy discussion on Hacker News .