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Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,240 posts.
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Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
NOTE: This article has been superseded by my more recent one here
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Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation
Every few months, it seems a new post decrying the use of markdown for documentation (or other things) rises to the top of Hacker News. There are often good reasons for preferring a more structured option, like reStructuredText, LaTeX, or Asciidoc. Especially in projects where more formal text is required, or where…
21126
Learn to remember everything: The memory palace technique
Picture courtesy of Shanidar You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here. In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And…
21127
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
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Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors
Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.” I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers…
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Cash Cows
He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Robert Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The…
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Midcentury North American Restaurant Placemats
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of…
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The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet
The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics. It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica. I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have…
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Let's Build an MP3 Decoder
Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…
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What the Four Color Theorem Can Teach Us About Writing Software
A visual exploration of what The Four Color Theorem can say about software complexity.
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Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
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Overkilling the 8-queens Problem
Last night, a fellow Hacker Schooler challenged me to a running-time contest on the classic eight queens puzzle. Naturally, I pulled up my trusty …
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Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.
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Omnimax
In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas…
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Machine Learning 101: What Is Regularization?
Posts and writings by Datanice
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Images over DNS
Some places say 255 bytes. They are wrong . Within a TXT record there are multiple character-strings (RFC 1035 section 3.3.14 ) and those are limited in length (because a single byte is used for their length), however there can be many of them.
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How to dismantle a compiler bomb
You have heard of “zip bombs” (a tiny ZIP file that decompresses to multiple gigabytes) and “XML bombs” (small XML file abusing the entities to consume lots of memory), and …
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Hengefinder: Finding when the sun aligns with your street
Next week in Manhattan, the sunset will align perfectly with the east-west streets of the city grid. It’s beautiful, and people know it. Twice a year, crowds gather to see the brief moment when the sun sits perfectly on the horizon, framed by skyscrapers on either side. It’s called Manhattanhenge , after Stonehenge.
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How to think about HTML responsive images
srcset, sizes, picture, source, and how they all fit.
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Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an Nvidia Spark via brute force with Claude Code
DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running …
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How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Bill to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion gets mysteriously gutted
I hope the media will look into this
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Clojure Plays Mario
Before getting too far into the weeds, let's begin with the results. Without too much effort, an AI was written in clojure that could complete all of the levels in the original Super Mario Bros for the NES except for the Bowser levels that have mazes. Namely, levels 4-4, 7-4, and 8-4 were not completed (more on this…