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Echo/printf to write images in 5 LoC with zero libraries or headersnetpbm
tl;dr: With the Netpbm file formats, it’s trivial to output pixels using nothing but text based IO
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
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Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT
If you read a description of a static analysis in a paper, what might you find? There’ll be some cute model of a language. Maybe some inference rules describing the analysis itself, but those rules probably rely on a variety of helper functions. These days, the analysis likely involves some logical reasoning: about…
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Raytracing won't simplify AAA real-time rendering
Realtime rendering and videogame programming mostly, but I love computer science and visuals in all their forms. This is a notepad of my ideas.
2644
Better Than JSON?
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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OCaml is Pretty Great (2019)
But OCaml is Pretty Great
2646
Inventing Monads
I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?
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Why I don’t usually meet startups in person (2019)
The other day, I tweeted. “Contrarian perspective here – it’s ok to *not* meet a founder in person before deciding to invest.” This set off a tweet firestorm — mostly …
2653
The Floppy Disk of Floating Point
An essay that bids farewell to x87 – a computing architecture too long for this world.
2654
Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…
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Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU) in Chromium
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
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Emotional debt in startups
Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How […]
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Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
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Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration
Extreme refurbishing of a Commodore SX-64 keyboard. Lots of putty, epoxy resin and spray painting with original color and more :)
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The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
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Is APL Dead? Not anymore
Is APL dead? Not anymore. Changes in modern hardware, business needs, development methods, and our understanding of programming makes APL in its modern state perhaps more relevant and viable than ever before.
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The Importance of India
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here. “Quantity has a quality of its own”–Attribution contested A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. Spain was able to control an overseas empire to a significantly greater degree than Portugal…
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Why Should You Learn Vim in 2020
Pros and cons of using a 30-year-old editor in 2020.
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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet
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AppStore Reviews Should Be Stricter
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
2667
What Is Life? (2019)
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…
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What “Roguelike” Meant
Several recently released games have rekindled the old discussions on the meaning of the word “roguelike”. This post is an attempt to…
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Who to ignore – bullshit filters
By Gabriel and Ernest Oppetit Unforseen shit happens. 9/11, the 2008 crash, Brexit, Trump, COVID-19… you know the story. These events surprised us because our information diets are domi…
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Imperial Wars Always Come Home
There’s a person I think about from time to time.