2911
The Sudoku Affair
Software design is a deliberate process, and requires deliberate effort.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
2912
Building a Firecracker-Powered Course Platform to Learn Docker and Kubernetes
The iximiuz Labs origin story: five years of technical blogging followed by six months of active development resulted in an online learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineers.
2913
The Shape of a Mars Mission
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
2914
Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts
Are speed dating and network effects contradictory?
2915
Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?
2916
More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
2917
Tmux – The Essentials (2019)
With only a handful of commands, tmux can still be your new best friend on the terminal
2918
"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
For other news from February, see my previous grapevine. This report is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.
2919
Resizable structs in Zig
In this post I will make the case for the concept of a “runtime resizable struct” in Zig. I will then design an API by exploiting Zig’s powerful comptime functionality.
2920
Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
2921
I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms
2922
Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved
The internet has been speculating the past few days on which crypto company spent $65M on Datadog in 2022. I confirmed it was Coinbase, and here are the details of what happened.
2923
The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions . But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM. I’m…
2924
Attention Is Bayesian Inference
My journey from building cricket bots to building “wind tunnels” with my collaborators — and finding the answer hidden in geometry.
2925
2926
Building a Personal Archive with Hoarder
How to self-host a personal archive of web content even if stuff get's taken down
2927
Hachi: An Image Search Engine
For quite some time now, i have been working on and off on a fully self-hosted search engine , in hope to make it easier to search across Personal data in an end to end manner. Even as individuals, we are hoarding and generating more and more data with no end in sight. Such "personal" data is being stored from local…
2928
8086 Microcode Browser
Since releasing 486Tang , I’ve been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original chip. That exploration naturally led me deep into the original 8086 microcode — extracted and disassembled by Andrew Jenner in 2020.
2929
We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
Lockfiles are an absolutely unnecessary concept that complicates things without a good reason. Dependency managers can and are working without it just the same.
2930
Europe is locking itself in to US LNG
The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into "long-term" energy dependence.
2931
You probably don't need query builders
In a previous [0] post I’ve discussed why I ditched sea-query and why sql is almostalways the best way to not re-learn something new from the beginning...
2932
A million ways to die from a data race in Go
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
2933
2934
Geolocation and Starlink
"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The…
2935
The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
2936
RegreSQL: Regression Testing for PostgreSQL Queries
Stop deploying broken SQL queries. RegreSQL provides regression testing for PostgreSQL queries with performance baselines and automated warnings.
2937
Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
This would be my website, I guess.
2938
Reverse Engineering the Constants in the Pentium FPU
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. 1 The Pentium incl...
2939
An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
2940
A beginner's guide to extending Emacs
How to build a custom completion backend for emacs from scratch.