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Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering
Distinguishing the trees from the forest in software engineering and how not to conduct interviews.
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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GeForce Now: A Review
In my writeup the other day about not getting a new computer (or, more accurately, about ordering one and then cancelling the order because of supply chain issues), I mentioned that in lieu of gett…
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Gnome Turns 25
Around the end of 2020, I looked at GNOME's commit history as a proxy for the project's overall health. A year and a half went by since then, and it's time for an update.
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Stop Writing Twitter Threads
If you've clicked on the links, you've probably noticed a pattern: they are all Twitter threads. And Twitter threads are an absolute abomination.
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Rewatch: Stargate SG-1 (2019)
Stargate SG-1 is the best and most balanced series to have ever aired on television. Ok, so some of you who have followed me for a very long time are thinking, “He’s making the same mis…
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America needs supply-side reform
It's can't just be an excuse — we need to improve our policies
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If only Borland had stuck with Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M (2013)
I have written previously about why Turbo Pascal is a Great Choice For Programming Under CP/M and now it is time to talk about what could have been. You probabl
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Why none of my books are available on Audible
And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55.
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How thick is a three-sided coin?
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
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Books Become Games
Simulation, Gamification, and the Rise of Algorithmic Capitalism
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ULIDs and Primary Keys
Not all non-sequential primary keys are created equal, the ULID format is a fantastic substitute for the typical UUIDv4 choice.
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Ssss: Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (2006)
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
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Using a tiny HC32L110 ARM chip
A while ago, Hackaday highlighted a new chip, the HC32L110. This chip was one of the many ARM-based microcontrollers that sprung up in China, but this one was remarkable because its diminuitive size: it came in an 16-pin WCSP package of a miniscule 1.6x1.4mm. Aside from that, it seems to be a chip that is somewhat…
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My mental model of how alpha opacity works is wrong (2020)
When plotting overlapping elements with a defined alpha (opacity), I had always thought about it as an additive process with results clamped to not exceed 1.
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Maps and Memory Leaks in Go
A map can always grow in memory; it never shrinks. Hence, if it leads to some memory issues, you can try different options.
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Formally Verifying Rust's Opaque Types
Introduction The other day I was reading this blog post covering existential types in Rust (also known as impl Trait or opaque types). In that blog post, the author makes the following claim. We’re going to have to take a slight diversion into type theory here because it motivates a result that is perhaps intuitive…
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part I: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022133 points61 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the long-awaited first part of a series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers…
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AI Content Generation, Part 1: Machine Learning Basics
This technology is already changing the creative industry. Here's how it works.
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It was all downhill after the Cuecat
Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent.
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10 Years of Nukemap
NUKEMAP was released into the world a decade ago, believe it or not.
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Ramanujan Factorial Approximation (2012)
Ramanujan came up with an approximation for factorial that resembles Stirling's famous approximation but is much more accurate. As with Stirling's approximation, the relative error in Ramanujan's approximation decreases as n gets larger. Typically these approximations are not useful for small values of n. For n = 5…
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My black body story (it's physics)
I studied physics in university, and at one point asked a professor if I should learn German, because it seemed all the key texts of early ...
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How stdbuf works
Harry Marr — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. Co-founded Dependabot, previously at GitHub, Monzo, and GoCardless.
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Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1
1. An advent: ancient archangels architect abstract astronomy and arid asteroids. 2. All asteroids are amorphous and absent; And a...