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Hi, hello, I’m back at it
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actua
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
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My favorite Erlang container
Forcing Kubernetes to let me do Erlang live code upgrades in a containerized deployment.
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Fixing the Unfixable: Story of a Google Cloud SSRF
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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Layout Breakouts with CSS Grid
Extending elements beyond the content area with CSS Grid and named grid lines.
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Fuzzy Metaballs: Approximate differentiable rendering with algebraic surfaces
Shape From Silhouette Reconstruction from a short cell phone video, showing reconstructed masks.
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The Algorithm for Hard Problems: Shake and Pull Gently
(Or, “regularized greedy algorithms and their applications.”) James Gilles “Algorithm” is one of those words that sounds fancier than it really deserves. We hear all the time about the “facebook algorithm”, the “youtube algorithm”, “high frequency trading algorithms”, “artificial intelligence algorithms”, and so on…
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NEC’s Tetris Processor
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
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Extending SQLite with Rust
SQLite has a powerful extension mechanism: loadable extensions. Being an in-process database, SQLite has other extensions mechanisms like application-defined functions (UDF for short). But UDFs have …
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Which one of these will be the biggest “unicorn” failure ever?
Jeffrey Lee Funk and Gary Smith have a list of startups with $3 bllion or more in cumulative losses:
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Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)
Data-driven approach to history
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Air Support in a Backpack: The Switchblade
In March 2022, it was reported that the United States was sending over some Switchblades to Ukraine.
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Leaderless Teams
Subscribe ◎⁃◎ Hello, Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane . I’m back in London after recent visits to Spain, France, Netherlands and Canada. Everywhere I went, the need for leadership to do more
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Adventures in Advent of Code
I’ve been participating regularly in Advent of Code for the past couple of years. It’s one of the highlights of my holiday season. The puzzles are fun, the stories are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s a neat way for me to keep the cobwebs brushed off some of the things I learned years ago that I don’t regularly use…
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An unsolicited streaming app spec
I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps. Most of them fall short of my expectations. Here, then, is a simple specification for a streaming video app. Follow it, and your app will be well on its way to not sucking .
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Linux commands for advanced hardware and system info
Sometimes you need info about hardware, and you probably lost your invoice, spec list or a password to a store website. Maybe you did an upgrade and this info isn't accurate anymore. It's an easy case for home users, but what to do is you have many machines
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A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
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Read “Data and Reality”
Once more: we are not modeling reality, but the way information about reality is processed, by people. — Bill Kent I've got this working theory that you can...
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Building a semantic search engine in Rust
If you're interested in building a semantic search engine in Rust, this article will show you how! We'll cover building a basic engine using sentence transformers and a kd-tree.
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Pages that didn't make it into “How DNS Works”
Pages that didn't make it into "How DNS Works"
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Do climate models predict extreme weather?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review
C++11 has been around for around 11 years and C++14 for 8. From my experience, I see that even today, many companies struggle to use those standards in production in the most efficient way. As always, with new stuff came benefits, risks, and increased learning effort. Fortunately, with a new book written by top C++…
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On Why I'm Quitting Alcohol
Essay 52
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How to write like Malcolm Gladwell
Prose style and structure in The Tipping Point
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What is a programmable programming language? (2019)
When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have…
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ChatGPT vs. a Cryptic Crossword
The first Times crossword Having seen several mind-blowing articles about ChatGPT’s ability (most notably this one), I wondered how ChatGPT would fare solving a cryptic crossword. I decided to try with an easy one: a Quick Cryptic from The Times. I had a search through the Times for the Times archives to try and find…
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How to stop a robot vacuum from getting stuck on the laundry rack
Is your robotic vacuum cleaner getting stuck on the laundry drying rack? Just raise the rack slightly off the floor and it becomes a natural robot barrier.
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Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (2017)
by James Wallace Harris, Friday, January 6, 2017 I first read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder just after it came out in 1981, before it won the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 1982. …