Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,903 posts.
When viewing LCD monitors from an oblique angle, it is not uncommon to witness a dramatic color shift. Occasionally, this can appear as a total color inversion. This is primarily caused by a polarization asymmetry, where light rays passing through the pixel matrix at oblique angles are influenced by the relative…
Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt…
Engineering at Forward | UCLA CS '19
A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
Today, DoorDash announced a new partnership with Waymo to launch an autonomous delivery service in Metro Phoenix and introduce a limited-time $10 Waymo promotion for DashPass members in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.
Apple today announced Apple Watch Series 5, debuting an Always-On Retina display that never sleeps.
Not bad just backwards
Dear PSF, We, organisers in the pan-African Python community, would like to raise some concerns and frustrations that have been brought to a...
The new 25% tariffs announced by the USTR , set to go into effect on July 6th, are decidedly anti-Maker and ironically pro-offshoring. I’ve examined the tariff lists ( List 1 and List 2 ), and it taxes the import of basic components, tools and sub-assemblies, while giving fully assembled goods a free pass. The USTR’s…
The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. There was no safety.
This post has moved to https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1237182.html
Link to: https://benpackard.github.io/blog/2020-01-28-sign-in-with-apple/
Why use something bloated when you could use something minimal.
Applying the engineering process to software interviews
A lot of people have been asking me what my upcoming book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, will be like. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the book that did not make the cut. I still think it’s a pretty good story and gives you a flavor. I just tell the truth so...
I offer a high-level model for why software work feels like it sucks now: we don't treat software like creative output.
Back to: April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year. | Forward to: Yet another bad idea
I believe Matt Mullenweg's abuses of his unilateral, unchecked powers prove that it is in the best interest of the entire WordPress community that he be removed from power immediately.
A list of the top ten static generators for building your next website
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…
New disclosures released yesterday show Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other firms requesting foreign worker H-1B visas this year.
If you and I ever had a longer conversation, chances are that Neal Stephenson might have come up once or twice. As contemporary authors go, Neal’s books are by far the most enthralling on my long and ever-growing reading list. This post is primarily written for people that usually shy away from reading what they…
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power , being inspired by Low-tech Magazine , doing the same thing (but better) 1 . The answer was 'yes', but only through spring and summer.
Having created my first app using Flutter, I weigh up the technology’s pros and cons against React Native
