Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure , to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. 1 1 And, of course, put me in a team that uses Blub, and…
In a shocking turn of events, several smartphone manufacturers, including industry giant Samsung, have taken a drastic step that has left customers outraged. These companies have remotely disabled phones purchased through gray markets, effectively holding the users’ data hostage until they buy new phones from official…
How a snacktime staple embodies a specific cultural moment
Every March, developers worldwide each try to make a roguelike game in less than 168 hours as part of the 7DRL Challenge . Roguelike games are hard , involving procedural level generation, pathfinding, line-of-sight algorithms, and more dijkstra maps than you can imagine.
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
Blog, Podcasts, Live Streams and Videos about Linux and Open Source with a focus on Ubuntu, Debian and NixOS.
There are many legitimate arguments to be had about performance, but there are also plain old excuses. It's time to end the excuses.
Ever wondered how cheap digital verniers are able to produce good precision at very low prices? I did, so I took one apart.
I was always curious about all that bad guys (criminals, drug dealers, hitman’s, thief’s etc.) using not very good and secure communication channels. Forgetting about whole OPSEC stuff. There is a lo
A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email , my management chain has made the decision to stop a...
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I…
This is the first part of a series of posts on big changes for SymPy with particular focus on speed. What I am going to describe in these posts are:
Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
The Lua programming language is unusual among its peers. It’s a dynamically typed, scripting language with a really small core (100-200kB), but runs efficiently, has far simpler semantics than other similar languages, and is just as old as the giants like JavaScript, Python, and Ruby – first made in a research lab…
Chronicling, plugin systems, and six other disjointed ideas combine in an argument of how to "engineerize" software more
In another episode of “I’ve been a web designer for how long and am only now learning about this?” let’s talk about CSS system colors. Background On my blog, I…
Originally developed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968, an L-System is a formalism to generate self-similar structures. Although, L-Systems are capable of generating famous fractals like the Sierpinski Triangle (Axiom: FXF--FF--FF, F → FF , X → --FXF++FXF++FXF-- , angle = 60 ) or the Gosper Curve (Axiom: FX, X →…
My paper P1144R8 “std::is_trivially_relocatable” has, in the past few months, been joined by three(!) papers out of Bloomberg:
In this guide, I will share the standard architecture for data-informed language model applications and explain forthcoming improvements in knowledge retrieval.
No not that web. The real web.
This post will show you how to use D to write a bare-metal “Hello world” program that targets the RISC-V QEMU simulator. In a future blog post ( now available ) we’ll build on this to target actual hardware: the VisionFive 2 SBC. See blog-code for the final code from this post. For a more complex example, see…
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental concept in linear algebra, and it is particularly important in the field of machine learning for tasks such as dimensionality reduction, data compression, and noise reduction.
In the world of data, textual data stands out as being particularly complex. It doesn’t fall into neat rows and columns like numerical data does. As a side project, I’m in the process of developing my own personal AI assistant. The objective is to use the data within my notes and documents to answer my questions. The…
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
Also, shortcomings in document retrieval and how to overcome them with search & recsys techniques.
