20731
A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,240 posts.
20732
CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs
I’ve been building out a small suite of command-line tools for working with ChatGPT, GPT-4 and potentially other language models in the future. The three tools I’ve built so far …
20733
The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
20734
The Tiniest GIF Ever
Yesterday I was base64-encoding an image so I could send it to CouchDB to test some code I’m working on for a client. It reminded me of something I did a while back to set cookies on a remote server.
20735
20736
Searching for DeepSeek's glitch tokens
A first attempt at identifying and cataloging DeepSeek's glitched tokens
20737
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
20738
Welp, there go my Git signatures
Hello! If you already know about the RoCA vulnerability, and you know what I did about it (or you don’t care), then feel free to skip down to the good stuff! Signs of Trouble Monday morning,…
20739
20740
Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
20741
How We Found All of Optimizely's Clients
Search Engine For Source Code. Find websites using technology, HTML, Javascript, CSS Tags.
20742
The Beauty of Roots (2011)
Around 2006, my friend Dan Christensen created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4:
20743
The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
20744
The depth and breadth of Python
As of late I'm noticing a trend: I'm spending more time having in-person in-depth conversations, and less time coding. While I regret the la...
20745
Compilers for free with weval
With some partial evaluation and specialization hints, it is possible to get pretty decent speedups on interpreters by turning them into compilers.
20746
Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning
My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a …
20747
20748
How to make Firefox builds 17% faster
In the previous post, I mentioned that buildcache has some unique properties compared to ccache and sccache. One of them is its Lua plugin system, which lets you write custom wrappers for programs that aren’t compilers in the traditional sense. With Bug 2027655 now merged, we can use this to cache Firefox’s WebIDL…
20749
Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code
Lately, there has been a lot of experimentation with very short programs that synthesize something that sounds like music. I now want to sha...
20750
Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
20751
Early Days on Street View
A friend was asking about the early Street View timeline, which prompted a trip down memory lane. It's been at least five years for most of...
20752
20753
A lazy way to solve differential equations
Looking at Taylor series as streams of real numbers, solving differential equations becomes as easy as writing them.
20754
A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos
In the past two months or so, I spent some time making tiny GLSL demos. I wrote an article about the first one, Red Alp . There, I went into details about the whole process, so I recommend to check it out first if you're not familiar with the field.
20755
20756
Data diffs: Algorithms for explaining what changed in a dataset (2022)
tl;dr: part 1 explains what an explanation algorithm is, and part 2 describes an open source SQL data differ.
20757
Build your own operating system
Ten years ago (around the year 2001) I wrote a simple x86 protected-mode OS just to find out how operating systems work. That was really gr...
20758
Building a constraint programming solver in Julia
How to build a constraint programming solver in Julia. Part 1: Solving Sudoku using backtracking
20759
Generating Voronoi diagrams using Fortune's algorithm
This article is about using Fortune’s Algorithm to generate Voronoi Diagrams in O(nlogn) time. If I’d known how hard it would be I wouldn’t have started it. If you are intending to implement it with the intent to actually use it, rather than as an exercise, I would recommend not using Fortune’s. Unless you are doing a…
20760
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
Announcing Geomys, a small firm of professional maintainers with a portfolio of critical Go projects.