4141
Writing a book in the age of open source
The power of engineering applied to writing
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,273 posts.
4142
Using ARG in a Dockerfile – beware the gotcha
Learning about the subtle gotcha with ARG and FROM instruction ordering in Dockerfile definitions.
4143
Three major LLM releases in 24 hours
I’m a bit behind on my weeknotes, so there’s a lot to cover here. But first... a review of the last 24 hours of Large Language Model news. All times …
4144
Preventing app removal on iOS
These days, I am developing an alarm app called ‘SuperAlarm’. To ensure a user is awake, SuperAlarm can be turned off only after a user completes a mission(e.g., taking a picture...
4145
LLM that can call multiple tool APIs with one request
Learn about Cohere models' ability to perform multi-step tasks, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
4146
Try to fix it one level deeper
I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme:
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4148
Dispatches from the farm upstate
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
4149
Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
4150
Lemonade Stand
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction This was a fun nostalgia trip. But it ended up being an attempt to collect and preserve some retro computing history as well… and I als…
4151
Carta's 83b Oversight: A Tax Trap for Married Startup Employees (2023)
There's a blind spot in Carta's 83(b) election feature you need to know about if you're married and living in California.
4152
Exploring How Cache Memory Works
Even though we often hear terms like L1, L2, cache block size, etc., most programmers have a limited understanding of what cache really is. This is a beginner-friendly primer on how cache works.
4153
Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout
I often need to launch a program in the terminal in a retry loop. Maybe because it's flaky, or because it tries to contact a remote service that is not available. A few scenarios:
4154
Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down
We build complex mathematical formulas bottom-up using pure lambda calculus. Includes instructions of how to translate Taylor series and other approximations to lambda terms.
4155
Erlang/OTP 27.0 Release Candidate 1
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
4156
How to Distribute Postgres Geographically
Documenting a pattern for making multi-tenant applications global by distributing the data, using only standard PostgreSQL functionality.
4157
Why Vivaldi won't follow the current AI trend?
Web browsers are integrating the current AI trend with Large Language Model (LLM) functionality. But there are fundamental issues with it. We address them.
4158
What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers
The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates is set to change the tech industry. What do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how can you prepare for this shift?
4159
Is it okay to daisy chain a UPS?
Is it OK to daisy chain UPSs? Let’s look at a few reasons this is a common question and alternative approaches that can better address the target.
4160
GRC SpinRite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
4161
Coming to Grips with Apple's Seemingly Unshakable Sense of Entitlement
No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it’s never a good idea to piss off the refs.
4162
The LaserDisc
The first mass market optical media
4163
Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine
The origins of Tailwind and how it is framed to solve the proposed issues of CSS
4164
Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS: Noble Numbat
Learn how Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS is built to empower open source developers and deliver innovation for the next 12 years. […]
4165
Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights
Southwest Airlines famously doesn’t show up when searching online travel agency websites. Historically if you’ve wanted to buy a ticket on Southwest, you’ve had to go directly to Southwest to make the purchase. But desperation and new government regulations appear to be changing all of that.
4166
"Doors" in Solaris: Lightweight RPC Using File Descriptors (1996)
A door is a "file" descriptor used to describe a procedure in a process and optionally some additional state associated with the procedure. Doors were initially designed as Spring object descriptors used to encapsulate the state and capabilities of C++ objects. A process which obtains a door is free to pass it, along…
4167
There Are No More Dogs in Antarctica
The first journey we made with the gold picture frame sledge was to a small glacier not far from the base known as 'Sunnyside Glacier'. Me and Fergal Buckley took photographs of several toys with...
4168
Eyes Wide Shut: Hidden in plain sight
Eyes Wide Shut is the last work of legendary movie director Stanley Kubrick, and like many of his films it contains layers of meaning not easily deciphered or understood on first viewing. Released in 1999 to mixed responses, Eyes Wide Shut has since garnered considerable interest and has come to be
4169
Regular expression functions in Excel
Check out three new functions that use Regular Expressions to help parse text more easily: REGEXTEST, REGEXEXTRACT, and REGEXREPLACE!
4170
Nixiesearch: Running Lucene over S3, and why we're building a new search engine
A new search engine in 2024? Yes, but stateless — index on S3, serverless — no cluster state, with all Lucene features — filters, autocomplete, facets. And also with local embedding & RAG inference.