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Latest update to my friend's 19 year side project
I've made a lot of progress recently focusing on refining my procedural planets and atmospheres. Added into the mix are multi-core particle...
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Jepsen: VoltDB 6.3
In the last Jepsen post, we found that RethinkDB could lose data when a network partition occurred during cluster reconfiguration. In this analysis, we’ll show that although VoltDB 6.3 claims strict serializability, internal optimizations and bugs lead to stale reads, dirty reads, and even lost updates; fixes are now…
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Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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Spaced repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Paypal froze our funds, then offered us a business loan
About a year ago, we made the decision to use Paypal as the primary payment method for our company, Hacker Paradise. After about a month…
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Slack client for Commodore 64
Slack is great. Many smarter people than me also think that Slack is great. Slack is great because its simple and easier to deal with than emails. With all t...
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On the (Small) Number of Atoms in the Universe
A Go board has 19 × 19 points, each of which can be empty or occupied by black or white, so there are 3 (19 × 19) ≅ 10 172 possible board positions, but "only" about 10 170 of those positions are legal. Here are some of them:
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Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in p…
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Rewrite Everything in Rust
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Why does software development take so long?
Nageru 1.4.0 is out (and on its way through the Debian upload process right now), so now you can do live video mixing with multichannel audio to your heart's content. I've already blogged about most of the interesting new features, so instead, I'm trying to answer a question: What took so long?
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Tech job listings are down 40% on several job boards
I run a job board that caters to tech jobs, primarily web professionals. This year has been pretty bonkers compared to previous years.
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The Path to Rust
About six months ago, I started my first large-scale Rust-based project. I’d dabbled with the language in its early days, but back then it was a different beast, and not particularly approachable. I decided to try again, and I’m glad I did. Rust is quickly becoming my favorite language for all systems work (which is…
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Android security in 2016 is a mess
Summary Your phone probably contains banking, payment and personal information that can be remotely stolen via numerous known and unknown bugs in the Android software. This is attractive to criminals. Vendors (LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc.), after selling you their phone, have no incentive to keep your phone’s software up…
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Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime
Join Illya Gerasymchuk on his new blog as he explores blockchain, DeFi, Zero-Knowledge cryptography, AI, and finance.
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Top Books on Amazon Based on Number of HN Users Linking Them in Comments
This visualization shows the top 29 books ranked by the number of unique users linking to corresponding Amazon pages in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
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A beginners guide to thinking in SQL
In this tutorial we will learn about the concepts behind the SQL syntax. We will go through the basics of how to use the FROM and WHERE clauses, and move on to more advanced topics like joins, aggregations and subqueries.
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