Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024130 points62 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…
Sometimes the new and shiny thing is way more fun than the thing that I genuinely want to ship... later.
Not sure if your compilers have matching ABIs? Then put them through the ultimate compatibility crucible and pair them up on a shift at The ABI Café! Find out if your one true pairing fastcalls for each other or are just another slowburn disaster. (Maid outfits optional but recommended.)
Writing a technical document is surprisingly hard. That is not because of the skill to tell a story. It’s because writing forces a level of clarity that is easy to gloss over while thinking through a topic.
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
Acknowledgements First, I would like to acknowledge my friends and kind internet strangers who helped me with this post. This post heavily adapts from ...
All of the data in this page is derived from these tests , so is true by some definition of true. Notable is this test - given an arbitrary SQL statement, it determines via runtime inspection which locks are taken.
“How to let go: one life ends while another begins. I’m seven months pregnant with our daughter as Jake’s life comes to a close. How do I walk into an uncertain future without him…
A possibly new algorithm for LLM Inference. Adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference.
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business
I knew the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Statistical Association, and the National Academy of Sciences had problems. It turns out the American Sociological Association does some bad things too.
I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes something is ju...
Programming blog of Eugene
The power of engineering applied to writing
Learning about the subtle gotcha with ARG and FROM instruction ordering in Dockerfile definitions.
I’m a bit behind on my weeknotes, so there’s a lot to cover here. But first... a review of the last 24 hours of Large Language Model news. All times …
These days, I am developing an alarm app called ‘SuperAlarm’. To ensure a user is awake, SuperAlarm can be turned off only after a user completes a mission(e.g., taking a picture...
I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme:
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction This was a fun nostalgia trip. But it ended up being an attempt to collect and preserve some retro computing history as well… and I als…
There's a blind spot in Carta's 83(b) election feature you need to know about if you're married and living in California.
I often need to launch a program in the terminal in a retry loop. Maybe because it's flaky, or because it tries to contact a remote service that is not available. A few scenarios:
