Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
The first mechanical device used in Russia for computational purposes was the Russian abacus ( schoty ). This device became "the national calculator" and was used in cashier's offices down to the middle of the 90's. It is interesting to note that the textbook "Trade calculations" published in 1986 devotes a whole…
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
I was just chatting with Ben Titzer on Twitter about control flow in his Virgil language (which is cool and you should definitely check ...
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue …
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
While trying to build my Age Apple Secure Enclave plugin , a small Swift CLI app, on Alpine Linux , I realized that the Swift toolchain doesn’t run on Alpine Linux. The upcoming Swift 6 will support (cross-)compilation to a static (musl-based) Linux target, but I suspect an Alpine Linux version of Swift itself isn’t…
There are lots of interesting little subproblems in compilation like instruction selection, register allocation and instruction scheduling. These can be expressed in declarative interlinked way to constraint solvers.
Doom Phone is a rotary phone that has been repurposed to control the classic first-person shooter game Doom via Bluetooth. We built it in two days during the "Internet Of Shit" hackathon organized by Technarium crew in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The way that most physicists teach and talk about partial differential equations is horrible, and has surprisingly big costs for the typical understanding of the foundations of the field even among professionals. The chief victims are students of thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and I've me
Authors: Yanbo Zhang, Benedikt Hartl, Hananel Hazan, Michael Levin
Using libblkio, QEMU Storage Daemon, and VDUSE
wrenfold is a framework for converting symbolic mathematical expressions (written in Python) into generated numerical code in other languages (C++, Rust, Python). It aims to bridge the gap between prototyping of functions in expressive symbolic form, and performant production code. wrenfold is particularly relevant to…
The underpinning of information theory is Shannon’s formula for the entropy H of a discrete probability distribution P. Derived in 1948 in the paper “A mathematical theory of communication”, this is given by \[ H[P] = -\sum_{i=1}^N p_i \log p_i \] where \( p_i = p(x_i) \) is the probability of sampling \( x_i \) from…
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views…
how tech makes hiring worse
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
I'm currently typing this blog post in a floating window in the middle of snow-covered Yosemite. I am a floating body manifested into the transcendental Tim Cook matrix. I look into the sky and follow the soft clouds as they pass overhead. They slowly part, revealing Steve Jobs' smiling face watching over me from the…
With AI encroaching every open forum on the internet, the future of human discourse is bleak.
How I built an ML rig for training LLMs locally, exploring hardware choices, setup tricks, and lessons learned along the way.
chordcat is a chord-naming application and a pet project of mine. It is written in C++ and SFML.
A lot of community applications died when API access to twitter, reddit & others was severely restricted, but they can't stop us from sharing our own data with each other!
I’ve noticed a small but interesting trend in the programming languages space. I’m not sure how novel it is, but this pattern, which I’ll refer to as “biphasic programming,” is characterized by languages and frameworks that enable identical syntax to express computations executed in two distinct phases or environments…
On his 65th birthday, Stephen Wolfram details how his 'now or never' thinking has made the last five years some of his most productive. Read about his projects in tech and science.
A guy decides to show off his Neovim setup.
Successful software is buggy software.
Rust compilation times is an ongoing topic that generates many discussions online1. Most people don’t really care about what exactly takes time when compiling Rust program; they just want it to be faster in general. But sometimes, you can see people pointing fingers at specific culprits, like LLVM or the borrow…
