Hacker News Front Page

Stories from the Hacker News front page worth reading.

Hacker News is the golden standard when it comes to sharing interesting links on the Internet. However, not all of those are read-worthy. We decided to do something about it. This page contains a selection of articles that hit the front page of Hacker News and are worth your reading time and attention.

Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?

20 days ago

Three weeks ago I wrote the following draft of a blog post entitled “Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?”. I am having a lot of doubts. I’ve been training for the Chicago Marathon in earnest since June, but in reality the preparations began a year ago when I was accepted based on my qualifying time ...

Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

22 days ago

After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. Th...

Another Burnout Post

23 days ago

I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed).

Frederick Law Olmsted: His Essential Theory (2000)

23 days ago

The teachings of Price, Gilpin, and Repton and the quiet example of his father provided the basis for Olmsted's aesthetic theories; they also underlay his refusal to follow the gardening fashions of his own time. The horticultural revolution of the early nineteenth century led gardeners to neglect o...

Esmeralda

23 days ago

A new village for families building the future

DHL Pioneered the Sharing Economy

23 days ago

The system worked amazingly well. The postal service then was notoriously slow and unreliable. By taking important documents and putting them in suitcases, DHL was able to guarantee timely delivery of critical business documents.

SOFA - Start Often Finish rArely

23 days ago

SOFA is the name of a hacker/art collective, and also the name of the principle upon which the club was founded. The point of SOFA club is to start as many things as possible as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects. The goal ...

Rethinking School Design

24 days ago

For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity; now, child-centric principles are reshaping contemporary educational spaces.

Plutocrat Archipelagos

25 days ago

On 23 August 1989, around a million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians expressed their desire for independence by joining hands to create ‘The Baltic Way’, a human chain that extended for over 690 kilometres from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius.

Why Don't We Use Awnings Anymore

26 days ago

When you look at old black and white pictures of cities from before the 1950s you may notice something on most buildings that are no longer there today. Awnings. They were ubiquitous over nearly every window of buildings from the most basic single family home to massive buildings like The White Hous...

Try to fix it one level deeper

26 days ago

Try to Fix It One Level Deeper Sep 6, 2024 I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme: There’s a bug! And it is sort-of obvious how to fix it. But if you don’t laser-focus on that, and try to perceive the surrounding context, it ...

Short films by Lillian F. Schwartz (1927-2024)

26 days ago

Films Home Art Analysis Biography Chinese Brush Collage Color 3D Animation Without Pixel Shifting Discoveries and Firsts Documentaries Drawings Electronic Restoration Etchings Films Graphics Partial Inventory Light Boxes Painting Photography Reviews Sculpture Videos Watercolor 2D to 3D Films Lillian...

The Age of PageRank Is Over

27 days ago

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with the concept of PageRank in their seminal paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998) they profoundly changed the way we utilize the web. For the next 25 years, humanity count...

Starship is Still Not Understood (2021)

28 days ago

Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …

The Quiet Art of Attention

28 days ago

There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. And it is then, perhaps, that a subtle truth begins to emerge: the only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, wit...

Some Notes on Upgrading Hugo

29 days ago

Some notes on upgrading Hugo • blogging • October 7, 2024 Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time...

The web I want vs. the one we have

29 days ago

I remember when I first arrived in Silicon Valley with a couple of products and after meeting Steve Jobs at Apple, and signing with the company that bought Visicalc, I felt like I had arrived, and …

Exploring 120 Years of Timezones

29 days ago

Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes ...

Are retrocomputers best left on or off?

29 days ago

I have a machine from 1998. I believe its hard drive and RAM are all original. It powers on and loads the OS, so I have reason to believe that nothing major is corrupted. However, is it best to lea...

Author and Aviator

1 month ago

Tom Lamont: Author & Aviator - James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers

The path to GM: some thoughts on becoming a general manager (2005)

1 month ago

Skip to main content This browser is no longer supported. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Download Microsoft Edge More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Table of contents Exit focus mode

Ironies of Automation (1983)

1 month ago

This paper discusses ways in which automation of industrial processes may expand rather than eliminate problems with the human operator.   ...

On 17th century "cocaine"

1 month ago

A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca

5 Years Later: The First Win

1 month ago

N3366 - Restartable Functions for Efficient Character Conversions has made it into the C2Y Standard (A.K.A., “the next C standard after C23”). And one of my longest struggles — the sole reason I actually came down to the C Standards Committee in the first place —

10-Year Narratives

1 month ago

What is changing now that will still be changing in ten years? Anchor your strategy on that.

The Nazi of Oak Park

1 month ago

It was a stunning revelation: A respected high school custodian had been a concentration camp guard. This excerpt of a new book examines how the disclosure of a dark secret in the early ’80s divided a suburb.

The Rise of Worse Is Better

1 month ago

The Rise of Worse is Better Richard P. Gabriel Lucid, Inc {an excerpt from "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big." [html]} 2.1 The Rise of Worse is Better I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this st...

Could we build a computer designed to last at least fifty years?

1 month ago

The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum on 2021-02-04 *How to create the long-lasting compu**ter that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct.* Each time I look at my Hermes Rocket typewriter (on the left in t...

The survival skills of Helena Valero

1 month ago

Anthropology has been bad at capturing the living conditions of women. A kidnapped woman who returned to civilization was the exception.

The Naming of America (2001)

1 month ago

THE NAMING OF AMERICA: FRAGMENTS WE'VE SHORED AGAINST OURSELVES BY JONATHAN COHEN The name America (applied to present-day Brazil) appeared for what is believed the first time on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, known as the Baptismal Certificate of the New World, and also America's Birth Cert...

Making the Web Boring Again

1 month ago

It's hard to imagine now, but in the 2000s web browsers were quite boring and didn't get updated very often. IE7 being released was a huge deal (indeed, Microsoft kept to a slower-moving schedule just as the rest of the industry was starting to pick up the pace). Opera was a viable fully-independent...

Manna – Two Views of Humanity's Future

1 month ago

Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future – Chapter 1 by Marshall Brain Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like ...

12 Months of Mandarin

1 month ago

Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They

Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation

1 month ago

Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation Oct 4, 2024 Modified on Oct 4, 2024 4 minute read This week I came across an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, focused on the benefits of meditation in his life. I see Jerry as a no-nonsense personality, one who’s reached the pinnacle of success in a compe...

Magic Isn't Real

1 month ago

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I Solve Problems (talk at EuroBSDCon 2024)

1 month ago

The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 - 'Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.'

What Excessive Screen Time Does to the Adult Brain

1 month ago

By Mary Grace Descourouez, MS, NBC-HWC Binge-watching television, watching YouTube videos for hours, or scrolling on your phone every morning may seem harmless, but research shows that too much screen time may be detrimental to your health. We know children’s brains are affected by spending too much...

The Fastest Mutexes

1 month ago

Cosmopolitan Libc has the fastest most efficient mutexes for contended workloads.

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Putting the "Person" in "Personal Website"

1 month ago

Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website” 2024-10-02 The other day I saw a meme that went something like this: Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has ...

Sausages: An Anthology

1 month ago

ALWYN TURNER selects some passages from British literature that concern sausages.

Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)

1 month ago

In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see their stream. ...

Dead Internet

1 month ago

Have you plucked away at this thing they call the ‘Internet’ lately?

Seven things I wish I would not hear as an autist

1 month ago

Among all the health conditions, diseases, disabilities and neuro-developmental challenges, it seems that Autism Spectrum Disorder is notorious for giving everybody a solid headache, no matter how they came to interact with it - as researchers, diagnosticians, autists ourselves or people who just ar...

A guide to working remote and not paying rent

1 month ago

Adjusting to this lifestyle hasn't been easy - truth be told it has taken a full year of learning through failure to learn the insights in the blog post below. I'm three years in on the journey of #vanlife and life is going to plan.

David Brin – The Dogma of Otherness

1 month ago

"The Dogma of Otherness" (published in full here) first appeared in the book Otherness, a collection of essays and short stories on the subject of, strangely enough, otherness. The article also appeared online (in abbreviated form) at crackaddict.com.

The Teacher Who Made Mistakes on Purpose

1 month ago

He was worried about losing them. He could write equations on the blackboard all day long, but if he didn’t find a way to connect with them soon, they’d never master multiplication up to 100. One day, once again concerned about reaching his third-graders, he was lost in thought and wrote “3 x 4 = […...

Kris Kristofferson has died

1 month ago

Kris Kristofferson, the revered songwriter whose poetic lyrics transcended genre, has died at age 88.

The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)

1 month ago

'There are no good modern pubs.' With original sketches from 1966 and scathing critique, Gardiner bemoans the state of London's pubs.

The Mega65

1 month ago

Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.

System Intiative is generally available

1 month ago

Refresh System Initiative Open main menu HomePricingPartnersDocsBlogNewsAbout UsJobs Log InSign Up System Initiative is the Future By Adam Jacob 9/25/2024 I’m incredibly proud to announce the general availability of System Initiative. It’s a revolutionary technology that is the future of how you wil...

Why I still blog after 15 years

1 month ago

Why I still blog after 15 years ★ Published: September 25, 2024 in 7f18f00 Tagged: Blog Time flies when you’re having fun. Before you know it, your little babies have started school, you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and that little blog you started have now been going for 15 year...

Thoughts on Debugging

1 month ago

I was recently asked to help resolve an escalation at work. It had already bounced around between a few people, and was very muddied with conflicting reports not to mention frustration that the issue existed in the first place. Apparently I am insane, because I like situations like this.

The Intelligence Age

1 month ago

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms?

1 month ago

What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms? Sep 21st, 2024 2:01 pm (This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platfo...

Gentle Guide to Self-Hosting

1 month ago

There was a time when software (and games! Games are just software for fun!) were distributed on DVD. A physical disk that you would insert into your system ...

Reports of the Death of Dental Cavities Are Greatly Exaggerated

1 month ago

If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and d...

A Word about Systemd

1 month ago

systemd is becoming de facto a standard init system for Linux. But even this choice of words is treacherous, because systemd is much more than an init system. It's basically an integrated redesign of all the low-level userspace of a Linux system, with great plans to change how software is run and or...

Trichloroethylene: An Invisible Cause of Parkinson's Disease?

1 month ago

The etiologies of Parkinson’s disease (PD) remain unclear. Some, such as certain genetic mutations and head trauma, are widely known or easily identified. However, these causes or risk factors do not account for the majority of cases. Other, less ...

Software is about people, not code (2020)

1 month ago

Dear new developer, When I was starting out, I thought that software development was all about code. After all, that was the main thing I was working on. Well, maybe not the main thing, as I needed…

Why to Not Write a Book

1 month ago

A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.

TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

1 month ago

News TouchArcade is Shutting Down Posted on September 16, 2024 by Jared Nelson This is a post that I’ve known was coming for quite some time, but that doesn’t make it any easier to write. After more than 16 years TouchArcade will be closing its doors and shutting down operations. There may be an add...

Retiring from the Idea of Retirement

1 month ago

I changed my mind and will not wait for retirement. Instead, I will focus on aligning financial investments with activities I enjoy till my last breath.

D&D is Anti-Medieval

1 month ago

You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…

How to Optimize Your Career for Happiness

1 month ago

The relentless pursuit of success often means chasing after promotions, pay raises, and prestigious titles. But what if we shifted our focus from these traditional metrics and instead optimized our careers for happiness?

Why Scrum Is Stressing You Out

1 month ago

Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.

To forget is an ethical act

1 month ago

On and off for the last several years I've been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a

Contempt Culture

1 month ago

So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages

"Design It Twice"?

1 month ago

Designing software is tough. I think we can all agree on that. No matter how much experience you have, your first idea about how to structure a module or system is usually not the best one. I had to l

Billiards is a good game (1975)

1 month ago

From our print archive: Gamesmanship and America’s first Nobel Prize scientist, Albert Abraham Michelson.

My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

1 month ago

My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong. Although now on its second motherboard and power supply, the system has yet to experience a single drive failure (knock on wood). Zero drive failures in ten years, how is that possible? Let's talk ab...

JG Ballard's Apocalyptic Art

1 month ago

In Empire of the Sun, published 40 years ago, the great novelist turned his childhood experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp into a form of personal liberation.

GitHub Taught Me to Micromanage

1 month ago

Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes relationships. This article explains ...

The Neverending Story

1 month ago

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture.

Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer

1 month ago

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...

David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way

1 month ago

I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote:  When you...

Tailwind CSS vs. Pico CSS (2022)

1 month ago

But the real hot piece of tech is not really a CSS framework as I remember them. Everybody is now talking about Tailwind CSS - a “utility-first CSS framework”. In case you’ve been living under a rock (like me): it’s a library that instead of giving you btn-primary gives you bg-blue-600. It pretty mu...

I Wish I Didn't Miss the '90s-00s Internet

1 month ago

about me I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements. the intern...

GPTs and Hallucination

2 months ago

Current Issue Past Issues Topics September 9, 2024 Volume 22, issue 4 PDF GPTs and Hallucination Why do large language models hallucinate? Jim Waldo and Soline Boussard The recent developments of LLMs (large language models) and the applications built on them such as ChatGPT have completely revoluti...

Debugging in the Multiverse

2 months ago

Would figuring out your bugs and outages be easier if you had a time machine? We are now making a time machine directly available to all of our customers.

A Manifesto for Radical Simplicity

2 months ago

Radical Simplicity is about cutting through the noise, focusing on what truly matters, and delivering results that are effective and efficient.

The Gift of Code

2 months ago

In the open source community, there is perhaps no greater gift than code. This is about that time 135,000 lines of gifted code created a new era of JavaScript

Mockingboard 4c+: Because Interrupts Are Hard

2 months ago

Mockingboard 4c+ By Quinn Dunki June 20, 2021 Because Interrupts Are Hard. The Apple II was (well, still is) a computer devoid of interrupts. I think most modern software engineers probably under-appreciate the implications of that. Folks skilled in writing main loops for games or graphics will at l...

Interviewing Epic Games Founder Tim Sweeney and Author Neal Stephenson

2 months ago

Tim and Neal’s thoughts on the definition of the “Metaverse,” its technological and economic growth, Neal’s reaction on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the future of Fortnite , their thoughts on Apple’s Vision Pro, blockchains, and the ethics of Generative AI, plus “Snow Crash 2," a

Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?

2 months ago

Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs? 34 points by DamnInteresting 18 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments I really love writing, and over the years I've cultivated a respectable audience of readers. But ...

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods

2 months ago

I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers. N...

What Does It Mean to Learn?

2 months ago

A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most.

Rediscovering the Small Web (2020)

2 months ago

Rediscovering the Small Web Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests an...

AnandTech Farewell

2 months ago

PIPELINE STORIES + Submit News Sabrent Rocket nano V2 External SSD Review: Phison U18 in a Solid Offering MediaTek to Add NVIDIA G-Sync Support to Monitor Scalers, Make G-Sync Displays More Accessible Qualcomm Adds Snapdragon 7s Gen 3: Mid-Tier Snapdragon Gets Cortex-A720 Treatment CXL Gathers Momen...

KDE Asking for Donations

2 months ago

Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well: Web and server hostin…

Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

2 months ago

Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make me want to fix it myself. While I understand that what I do next is beyond a large number of Advantage Air customers, i...

GeoWorks: The Other Windows

2 months ago

Before Windows became a fact of life for most computer users, a scrappy upstart named GeoWorks tried taking Microsoft on. It failed, but it gave us AOL.

Marcus Aurelius: On Humility and Duty (2019)

2 months ago

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, …

13 Years of Building Infrastructure Control Planes in Ruby

2 months ago

Ubicloud has the ambition of writing an open source alternative to AWS, Azure, or GCP. Its control plane is written in Ruby, a fact that surprises some people. Our cofounder, Daniel, has been building infrastructure control planes in Ruby for 13 years, starting with Heroku. He recently presented at...

Fixing a Bug in Google Chrome as a First-Time Contributor

2 months ago

A rundown of my experience finding and fixing a bug in the Chromium/Google Chrome browser - specifically in the devtools. It includes details about the bug itself as well as notes about what it was like working on the Chromium project as a first-time contributor.

With Power Comes Great Responsibility Platforms Want to Be Utilities (2021)

2 months ago

Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the fou...

JavaScript Dates Are About to Be Fixed

2 months ago

Why I’m excited about the new Temporal API in JavaScript: finally, easy and accurate date handling with time zones using ZonedDateTime. Say goodbye to the headaches of traditional Date objects.

OpenSSH Backdoors

2 months ago

Imagine this: an OpenSSH backdoor is discovered, maintainers rush to push out a fixed release package, security researchers trade technical details on mailing lists to analyze the backdoor code. Speculation abounds on the attribution and motives of the attacker, and the tech media pounces on the sto...

Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS

2 months ago

Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved...

Designing My Own Watch (2020)

2 months ago

Last month I received my custom made wristwatch from Switzerland, it is a minimalistic mechanical annual calendar designed to be understated and true to the metal.

The Euphemism Treadmill

2 months ago

I sometimes get annoyed with John McWhorter, but when he’s good he’s very good, and his Aeon essay on euphemisms is probably the best thing I’ve read on this vexed topic. The core of his point is in this paragraph: What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the e...

Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov

2 months ago

Do Low-level Optimizations Matter? by Nathan Myers, ncm at cantrip dot org, 2020-01-09 Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1,2,3. We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size...

How I started blogging (2024)

2 months ago

Why I Blog August 20, 2024 The idea of blogging always seemed so fun and yet I went many years without publishing any content online. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since highschool (over a decade ago). I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. This post walks through my journey, which starts from to...

Dropbox Acquires Reclaim.ai

2 months ago

I’m excited to share that Reclaim.ai has been acquired by Dropbox, and our team will be joining to help drive the future of productivity for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The cruelty of teaching computing science (1988)

2 months ago

EWD 1036 On the cruelty of really teaching computing science The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to w...

The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device

2 months ago

The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device or: how to survive the near death of stop-motion By Ian Failes In visual effects lore, it is well-known that the full-motion dinosaurs of Jurassic Park…

Late Again

2 months ago

Awkward. Seven of us now. Sitting around the table. Five minutes since the start of the meeting. We've used up our chit-chat allowance and wonder if you will show. In the scheme of things relevant to a company's success, showing up late to a meeting is not the end of the world. When it happens a l

The Dying Computer Museum

2 months ago

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …

Markov chains are funnier than LLMs

2 months ago

Table Of Contents What is a Markov chain What is funny The predictability of LLMs Why this is interesting Before explaining any of these terms, let’s try to establish this anecdotally. 12:2 And I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and our sins be upon us, because of our use of not and lisp-...

On Being a Senior Engineer

2 months ago

UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of sponsorship. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially

Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

2 months ago

I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively ine...

I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend

2 months ago

LeanerCloud News LoginSubscribe 0 LeanerCloud News Posts Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu June 01, 2024 This is an expanded version of a LinkedIn post I wrote the other day. The first email...

The last secret of the H.L. Hunley

2 months ago

James McClintock designed the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. But the extraordinary last act of his life involved Scottish bomb-makers, Irish terrorists, trance mediums equipped with death rays …

The Flywheel Effect

2 months ago

contactaboutservices JIM COLLINS Concepts Books Tools Articles View All Articles Commentary Culture Leadership Organization Self-Management Social Sectors Strategy Technology Forewords Video/Audio Young Leaders All Video/Audio What is Great? Level 5 Leadership First Who, Then What Hedgehog Concept B...

The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth – Userlandia

2 months ago

I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,

The Untold Story of SQLite

2 months ago

On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored...

The Games People Play with Cash Flow

2 months ago

One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.

Programmers Don't Read Books – But You Should (2008)

2 months ago

One of the central themes of stackoverflow.com is that software developers no longer learn programming from books, as Joel mentioned: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Joel ex...

How to triage patients and run a ER during a mass casualty incident

2 months ago

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local ...

Things I learned from teaching (2023)

2 months ago

If you're teaching a topic, you're probably really passionate about it (unless, of course, the department forced you to teach the class). At the very least, I am. Chess engines are cool. Lucky for me, students taking a COLL course get little in the way of credit for the class, so most of my pupils w...

What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

2 months ago

In order to understand JI, first you have to "empty your cup". Most people's cup is occupied by 12-tone equal temperament (12TET), which defines the notes we're typically allowed to play. To understand 12TET, start with the octave: going up or down one octave means multiplying or dividing the freque...

The Goths

2 months ago

1. To assert of someone that they are “dead” can sometimes be intended, beyond the bare biological fact this might report, to mean that that person no longer matters, that they now belong to an irrelevant past.

Millions of years for plants to recover from global warming

3 months ago

Catastrophic volcanic eruptions that warmed the planet millions of years ago shed new light on how plants evolve and regulate climate. Researchers reveal the long-term effects of disturbed natural ecosystems on climate in geological history and its implications for today.

Shanghai's Automotive Metamorphosis

3 months ago

Over many visits over two decades, I have witnessed China's meteoric rise from a land of bicycles to an electric vehicle powerhouse.

Perceived Age

3 months ago

Writing About Work Perceived Age "To live is to be other. It's not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday is not to feel—it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."...

Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool

3 months ago

Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool August 8th, 2024 Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I sho...

Do Quests, Not Goals

3 months ago

South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back to so-and-so. Read that health and safety thing for work. If you were to make a list of...

Ergodic Literature

3 months ago

Ergodic literature is a subgenre of literature that upends the very fabric of storytelling itself.

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

3 months ago

“From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed.”

The Future of Open Source

3 months ago

A GitHub founder's musings on the past, present and future of large groups of people collaborating on software in awesome ways.

The ancient art of roasting agave

3 months ago

Now more famous as a distilling ingredient, agave has been a traditional food in Southern California for millennia.

The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

3 months ago

Books in Progress is what we call a “public drafting tool”: Drafts will be made available for comment from the public, allowing for direct collaboration between author and reader.

The Composer Has No Clothes

3 months ago

The composer Tristan Foison was a plagiarizing fabulist. His brief success reveals the rot at the heart of the classical music industry.

How I Program in 2024

3 months ago

now about contact Kartik Agaram Freewheeling Apps Jul 31, 2024 How I program in 2024 I talk a lot here about using computers freely, how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such i...

The Introverts Are Winning

3 months ago

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other

"We ran out of columns" – The best, worst codebase

3 months ago

In a large legacy system, the database is more than a place to store data, it is the culture maker. The database sets the constraints for how the system as a whole operates. It is the point where all code meets. The database is the watering hole. In our case, that watering hole had quite a bit of po...

C Isn't a Programming Language Anymore (2022)

3 months ago

C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore Aria Desires March 16th, 2022 Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them. Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them. He’s trying to materially improve the c...

I Like NetBSD, or Why Portability Matters

3 months ago

NetBSD is one of the oldest BSDs still around, its initial release being in 1993. NetBSD is based on the original UCB 4.3 BSD, and upon installation provides a small old-school minimal desktop. Out of all the already niche BSD systems, it is one of the smaller ones. The more used BSDs these days are...

How Great Was the "Great Oxidation Event"?

3 months ago

Geochemical sleuthing amid acid mine runoff suggests that scientists should rethink an isotope signal long taken to indicate low levels of atmospheric oxygen in Earth’s deep past.

With CO2 Levels Rising, Drylands Are Turning Green – Yale E360

3 months ago

Despite warnings that climate change would create widespread desertification, many drylands are getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air — a trend that recent studies indicate will continue. But scientists warn this added vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies.

The Little Tech Agenda

3 months ago

The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

DHH: Make Software Simple Again

3 months ago

Software industry has become more driven by profit and unnecessary complexity that by the ability to build and launch innovative products.

I love you, HN, but you're toxic (2022)

3 months ago

When I got off social media about a year ago, I wanted to replace it with something more productive, so I chose Hacker News. I had already been on HN for many years, but decided that I would start visiting it as often as I did with an app like Instagram or TikTok. If I was going to be spending hours...

Attribution is dying, clicks are dying

3 months ago

Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we've got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I'm being intentionally provocative. But it's because

50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's passing

3 months ago

An approaching anniversary date of former MIT Chairman and Dean of Engineering Dr. Vannevar Bush prompts me to write today. As his sole biographer has just highlighted in IEEE Spectrum, this Friday will mark 50 years since the Jun. 28, 1974 passing of this individual whose footprint looms large on g...

Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System

3 months ago

Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so man...

A man who forgot about his own wedding

3 months ago

Boogie Math Random Teaching Studying Friends About Random Teaching Studying Friends About Random Yeah, a true intellectual Is math irrelevant? Teaching kids Where is my Dirac? Why I am not Dirac You stupid teacher! Along the banks of the Nile Interested in integers Oscar Zariski - forgot about his o...

Objective-C is like Jimi Hendrix (2014)

3 months ago

The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix I had no idea what all the fuss was about. Sure, it was great, but it wasn't changing my life. Maybe a decade later, it hit me: thirty years previous, he'd changed...

The New Internet

3 months ago

We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.

The Decline of Mobile Development

3 months ago

Mobile (Android and iOS) is getting harder and harder to develop for, and devs are leaving the platforms out of frustration and annoyance. With each new OS update a slew of new requirements have to be met otherwise you’ll face “restrictive action” against your app by a particular time. Usually this ...

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

3 months ago

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…

Defense of Lisp Macros

3 months ago

Defense of Lisp macros Replacing Lisp's beautiful parentheses with dozens of special tools and languages, none powerful enough to conquer the whole software landscape, leads to fragmentation and extra effort from everyone, vendors and developers alike. The automotive field is a case in point. Intro ...

Cutting forests for solar energy 'misses the plot' on climate action

3 months ago

I once had a sweet, brown pit bull mix named Thembi, who had impressive musculature and a magnificent nose. Often on our walks, I would feel the leash go taut and know she’d sniffed out something tantalizing, likely a squirrel or a rabbit. She would snuffle excitedly, muzzle to the ground, tracing h...

Legacy

3 months ago

Humans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.

MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)

3 months ago

The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine) or be synthetic (like amphetamine) - but with a slightly differ...

Engage, Don't Show

3 months ago

Lea Verou Home Blog Specs Projects Speaking Publications Press About Repo Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show! 3 July 2024 4 min read 0 comments Report broken page

Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019)

3 months ago

Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post …

Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

3 months ago

This post is a response to Do people IRL know you have a blog? A short while before I came across bacardi55’s call to conversation, I asked my wife if she wanted to see something cool. She said yeah. I showed her the Reading section, and explained that I was constructing the functionality to track m...

Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind

3 months ago

In the early hours of May 13th, 2024 and after about sixteen hours of play over two days, I achieved one of my poker dreams and outlasted 773 entrants in the RunGood Poker Series $800 No Limit Hold’em Main Event hosted at Graton Casino and Resort to claim the outright win and top prize of $85,780.

Why I left Google

3 months ago

How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.

GPG and Me (2015)

3 months ago

I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...

Exothermic Core-Mantle Decoupling – Dzhanibekov Oscillation (ECDO) Hypothesis

3 months ago

that we are now well past an Indigo Point of exothermic core-mantle decoupling, and that we have incorrectly interpreted the heat presented by this transpiration as being caused by man's activity alone. We now face the urgent need to detect the approach of a subsequent Tau Point Dzhanibekov oscillat...

Is OpenSUSE at Crossroads?

3 months ago

Just when I thought that openSUSE was free from stupid corporate decisions, their main sponsor, SUSE S.A., came with a strange request: openSUSE should “stop using the SUSE brand”! WTF is that shit?! (H/T to Linuxiac.) 1. Lately, animosity arose around an “Open Letter to the openSUSE Board, Project ...

What Happened to Bert and T5?

3 months ago

A Blogpost series about Model Architectures Part 1: What happened to BERT and T5? Thoughts on Transformer Encoders, PrefixLM and Denoising objectives

Microsoft outage: Chaos as internet down and flights grounded around the world

3 months ago

Live Microsoft IT outage live: Chaos as internet down and flights grounded around the world Passengers have been forced to wait at check-in desks at Gatwick Airport which have been hit by the severe delays amid a global IT outage Credit: @sergepoliakoff Key moments Chosen by us to get you up to spee...

Bob Newhart, Comedy Icon, Dies at 94

3 months ago

Bob Newhart, the genteel comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and '80s, died Thursday. 

The Semmelweis myth and why it's not true (2018)

3 months ago

To create a real impact on the world is no simple thing. Innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and those things rarely happen in the same place. That’s why effective innovators are great collaborators.

Panic at the Tech Job Market

3 months ago

Panic! at the Tech Job Market Panic! at the Job Market “I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and unloved.” ready for another too-long article about personal failure while blaming the world for our faults? let’s see where we end up with 7,000 9,000 10,000 11,500 ...

I lost my love for the web (2022)

3 months ago

Josh is the founder of NiftyCo, a tech entrepreneur who has been fascinated by computers since childhood. With a career spanning over two decades, he brings various software solutions to life while embracing the challenges of entrepreneurship and coding.

The Last Avant-Garde

3 months ago

Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.”

Darwin Machines

3 months ago

I'm writing this because I've been obsessed with the theory of a Darwin Machine for nearly a year now and I haven't met anyone else who has heard of it.

The All-American Delusion of the Polygraph

3 months ago

A few weeks before the release of my first book, a memoir about my mother’s murder, I had to take a polygraph exam. The two things were not in fact related, but that was easy to forget once I found…

The Stratocaster Turns 70

3 months ago

Join us on a trip through Fender's factory, Custom Shop, Master Builder department and head office, in celebration of a radically innovative instrument that continues to find new ways to move music forward, even seven decades after its launch.

Quartz: A Deterministic Time Testing Library for Go

3 months ago

Learn how we enhanced TCP performance in Coder to achieve 5X faster throughput by optimizing buffer sizes, implementing the HyStart algorithm, and minimizing packet loss, significantly improving remote development experiences.

Seiko Originals: The UC-2000, A Smartwatch from 1984

3 months ago

Imagine a smart watch, but from 1984. That sounds like something straight out of a scifi film since the 80s is not exactly known for great advances in personal computing. Well, it’s real, and it is exactly what Seiko created back in the day and was known as the UC-2000 - a “personal information proc...

Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

3 months ago

In early 2005, Michael Arrington, a lawyer, and Keith Teare, an entrepreneur, started a fund called Archimedes Ventures. Their idea at the time was to invest in Web 2.0, meaning the nascent world of web apps. They built a few products at the time. One was an online classified ad service called Edge....

How to Know When It's Time to Go

3 months ago

I retired in 2021 at 63.5 after about four decades as a programmer. What made me do this was not failing ability in any way, but after a year of consideration, I realized I didn't care to do it anymore. Everyone will eventually reach a point at which they

Building the Bell System

3 months ago

If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top. It’s large, but not notably so: it came in 32nd in the 2024 Fortune 500 ranking, just above Comcast and below Verizon. Its offerings are not unique: it’s just one of many c...

Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

3 months ago

There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to ...

Use a Work Journal to Recover Focus Faster and Clarify Your Thoughts

3 months ago

Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts 2024-Jul-12 You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task already. Your manager explained to you in no uncertain terms ...

Hey Google, what happened to all the fun?

3 months ago

This is the story of how Google killed a 14 year old Android app overnight. 2008 was a time when the web had mostly become ubiquitous but still before most people carried it all with them in their pocket on a smartphone. For me, a high school student at the time without a smartphone, my programming ...

Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control

3 months ago

Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control Weihao Tan3 *, Wentao Zhang3 *, Xinrun Xu5 *, Haochong Xia3 †, Ziluo Ding2 †, Boyu Li3 †, Bohan Zhou4 †, Junpeng Yue4 †, Jiechuan Jiang4 †, Yewen Li3 †, Ruyi An3 †, Molei Qin3 †, Chuqiao Zong3 †, Longtao Zheng3 †, YuJie Wu1 †, Xia...

A personal music streaming server that works

3 months ago

Host and stream your own music with ease. Open-source, modern, snappy, and comes packed with extensive features, Koel is the music streaming solution that actually works.

Why I'm Writing a Book on Cryptography (2020)

3 months ago

Why I’m Writing A Book On Cryptography posted July 2020 I’ve now been writing a book on applied cryptography for a year and a half. I’m nearing the end of my journey, as I have one last ambitious chapter left to write: next-generation cryptography (a chapter that I’ll use to talk about cryptography ...

The Typeset of Wall·E

3 months ago

From a trash-filled Earth to the futuristic Axiom and back again, WALL·E is a finely crafted balance between consumerist dystopia and sixties space-race optimism. Please join me, then, for a detail…

Why We Build Simple Software

4 months ago

In this post, we’re going to talk about the value of simplicity in software. Simple tools are easier to use, more reliable, and more valuable than their complex counterparts. First, let’s start with my car. I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, which I bought used in Spring

The price of gold – how bad do you want it?

4 months ago

„If it feels too good, then it’s wrong“, says Christian Olsson, a famous Swedish triple jumper in his interview for a documentary called „The Price of Gold“.  With this sentence Olsson states that …

The Neuroscience of Resistance to Change

4 months ago

Explore how understanding the brain helps tackle resistance to change in the workplace. This article offers effective ways for leaders to boost learning and adaptability in their teams. Learn how to make learning safe and engaging, and see why small successes matter. Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and anyon

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

4 months ago

Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.

'It's like I drew a door and disappeared through it' (2021)

4 months ago

Homeless people in Russia have their own terms for things — people who aren’t homeless are “domestic” people, while they themselves are “street” people, or simply “bums.” Meduza’s special correspondent Irina Kravtsova spent several days with homeless people in St. Petersburg, asking them the most ob...

Doomsday Prepping: Reactionary Behavior or Inherited Instinct?

4 months ago

The Prepper Next Door In 2011, the television show Doomsday Preppers began airing on National Geographic, bringing mainstream attention to what appeared to be an obscure phenomenon. [1] The series featured “preppers” stockpiling bunkers with enormous amounts of food and ammunition while conducti

John von Neumann: The Man from the Future

4 months ago

Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story ab…

Microsoft Is Dead[2007]

4 months ago

April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of...

Tokens are a big reason today's generative AI falls short

4 months ago

techcrunch techcrunch We, TechCrunch, are part of the Yahoo family of brandsThe sites and apps that we own and operate, including Yahoo and AOL, and our digital advertising service, Yahoo Advertising.Yahoo family of brands. When you use our sites and apps, we use CookiesCookies (including similar te...

Cynicism Is Easy, Optimism takes work

4 months ago

I recently had a conversation with a friend about my twitter journey. I told him about how random accounts have responded with kindness in Dms when I was jus...

Advantages of incompetent management

4 months ago

Improving efficiency tends to be against the interest of most people in an org, because it’s equivalent to shrinking your budget. Here’s what I’m told is a true story about how things work with actual budgets. A relatively inexperienced VP attends a meeting where senior management is asked to shrink...

The Origin of Ambergris (2012)

4 months ago

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Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960)

4 months ago

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; ...

The Origin of the Species: NEC PC-8001 FDD Adapter

4 months ago

NEC moved into personal computing relatively quickly. After the hobbyist and industrial success of the TK-80, they produced a handful of “better TK-80s,” which didn’t do as well as the original. Ultimately, they developed a whole new system: the 1979 NEC PC-8001. And boy, did they ever nail it.

Heavy resistance training at retirement age induces lasting beneficial effects

4 months ago

Objectives Muscle function and size decline with age, but long-term effects of resistance training in older adults are largely unknown. Here, we explored the long-lasting (3 years) effects of 1 year of supervised resistance training with heavy loads. Methods The LIve active Successful Ageing (LISA)...

All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second

4 months ago

I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...

The Queen's Doll's House

4 months ago

On the freaky model world of the Dollomites; plus—more lucid dreaming and a roundup of recent favorites.

BusyBeaver(5) is now known to be 47,176,870

4 months ago

The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to…

The future is self-hosted

4 months ago

Self-hosting software comes with privacy, simple pricing and it's distributed by design. Why are we not building more self-hosted products?

Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)

4 months ago

HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.

When Rand Made Magic in Santa Monica

4 months ago

RAND’s halcyon days lasted two decades, during which the corporation produced some of the most influential developments in science and American foreign policy. So how did it become just another think tank?

Pharma firms stash profits in Europe's tax havens

4 months ago

Investigate Europe finds 15 of the world’s biggest drugmakers operate more than 1,300 subsidiaries in tax havens, as they amassed over €580 billion in global profits over the past five years. Meanwhile, patients face life-threatening delays for medicines due to high drug prices.

"Computers Are Useless" and Other Sayings

4 months ago

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” ~ Pablo Picasso “Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.” ~ Stan Kelly-Bootle Back then, the…

Watching "Grizzly Man" with a Bear Biologist

4 months ago

Our Gen Z editor had a secret: She had never seen Grizzly Man. We recruited bear biologist and podcast host Wesley Larson to watch it with her and recorded their reactions.

The self-hosting revolution is here

4 months ago

That's a big claim. We don't really think self-hosting is better for everyone, but read this article to see if it might be better for you.

Conway's Game of Life for curved surfaces (2012)

4 months ago

Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata.  It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser!  The rules for the Game o…

A Model of a Mind

4 months ago

I’m trying to make a system that can behave like a human. Consciousness is a personal motivation, but I’m not going to focus on it as a goal because it’s difficult to define well and people often disagree about it. This article instead looks at some aspects of minds that — while still challenging — ...

Work Hard

4 months ago

Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…

A Bunch of Programming Advice I'd Give to Myself 15 Years Ago

4 months ago

A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it...

Researchers at ETH Zurich develop the fastest possible flow algorithm

4 months ago

Before Kyng, no one had ever managed to do that – even though researchers have been working on this problem for some 90 years. Previously, it took significantly longer to compute the optimal flow than to process the network data. And as the network became larger and more complex, the required comput...

How I overcame my addiction to sugar

4 months ago

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood I remember my breakfast as a kid. It was as sugary as it gets, with cereal and milk or a good marmalade toast and a chocolate shake to start my day. I remember the highs and lows of my energy levels throughout the day or how I would look in the mirror and wonder why I grew as...

I'm Terrified of Old People

4 months ago

I used to be extremely confident in myself. I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep, how to make friends, and how to live their lives. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science from the ground up. I was dismissive of everyone who didn’t impr...

Do I Regret Being 'Just' a Software Engineer?

4 months ago

Do I Regret Focusing on 'Just Being' A Software Engineer? A semi-biographical piece of reflection about being in tech, how and why I got in and my growing want to eject by me, Jacky Alciné • published Jun 29, 2024 • 14 min to read, 4217 words You can listen to me reading this post! How else to start...

Serpentine

4 months ago

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

What Happened to People Magazine?

4 months ago

How the Most Important Celebrity Magazine of the Last 50 Years Started Endorsing "The Best Air Purifiers of 2024"

Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

4 months ago

In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I....

A dev's thoughts on developer productivity

4 months ago

Developers are systems thinkers and yet, most measures of developer productivity are metrics-based, instead of systems-based. In this post, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu presents five charts that visualize what really matters for developer productivity.

Is Everything BS?

4 months ago

BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—is actually suboptimal.

A New Package for Making Charts in Emacs: Eplot

4 months ago

One of the items on my todo list was: And that’s because I’ve been looking for an easy way to do simple plots for yonks. When I did a post about movie ratings, I tried chart.el: It&#821…

American Singapore(s): Competent city governance hiding in plain sight

4 months ago

Everyone talks about Singapore as an effective (but some say cold) governance model. Many people wish that American cities and towns could follow Singapore's example. However, the ingredients of its success can already be found throughout America. With plenty of cities delivering impressive results....

The Singularity Is Nearer

4 months ago

The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come Since it was first published...

Paramount Erases Mtv.com Archives, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30+ Years

4 months ago

MTV.com is gone. Kaput. Wiped off the face of the Earth. Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by ...

Indonesia’s Emergence

4 months ago

Indonesia’s emergence was both more violent and more pioneering than commonly imagined

How to Do The Jhanas

4 months ago

The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained concentration, without any external stimuli or substances. This is a practical guide...

A Person of Compute

4 months ago

We will define one person of compute as 20 PFLOPS (64 A100s, or a single dense 42U A100 rack). We are in the era of the 1 rack person, consuming about 30kW to provide those 20 PFLOPS.

Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4

4 months ago

Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.

Infinitone Microtonal Saxophone

4 months ago

Music is widely considered to be a freeing experience of self-expression. But you may be surprised to learn that the twelve musical tones that shape o...

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (2018)

4 months ago

From tech in NYC to chemical manufacturing in Nasik (India), here’s a guide that hopefully nobody ever needs. On April 17, 2017 my dad died. It was the worst day of my life. It was also the day I started to lead a second company – his company. (Note: the first company is CB Insights.) His company wa...

A Forth Story (1995)

4 months ago

Groups Conversations All groups and messages Send feedback to Google Help Training Sign in Groups comp.lang.forth Conversations About Privacy • Terms info Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable. Dismiss Learn more     A Forth Story...

Climate Zones

4 months ago

Explore how will your city feel in the future.

A Rant about Front-end Development

4 months ago

I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Not...

Thoughts on Desktop Operating Systems in 2024

4 months ago

In the mid-to-late 90s I had my first encounters with computers. I remember playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II in elementary school, typing random letters and numbers on a friends MS-DOS machine to print out on a dot-matrix printer, and disassembling old broken PCs and HDDs for fun and a peek at th...

Notes on Tajikistan

4 months ago

Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …

Free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life

4 months ago

LWN .net News from the source Content Weekly Edition Archives Search Kernel Security Events calendar Unread comments LWN FAQ Write for us Edition Return to the Front page User: Password: | | Subscribe / Log in / New account How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life [LWN subscriber-only content]...

1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch

4 months ago

1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch “Ah, it’s time to order a more practical watch!” Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there h...

Fast Crimes at Lambda School

4 months ago

Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish

The hacking of culture and the creation of socio-technical debt

4 months ago

The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shi...

Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

4 months ago

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o

One year of solo dev, wrapping up the grant-funded work

4 months ago

A year ago I walked out of the office for the last time. I handed in my corpo laptop, said some good-byes, and since then I have been my own boss. This first year has been funded by an NLnet grant, which I’m in the midst of wrapping up. As of now, the work is all done, the final request for payment ...

Peak Population Projections

4 months ago

Peak Population Projections Posted on 2024-06-04 by tmurphy Last week, I reported the surprising realization that official population projections from the United Nations adhere to a notion of future fertility that appears to be immediately at odds with present real trends. The recent rapid decline i...

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The Public Interest Internet, by Robin Berjon

4 months ago

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about var...

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A Note on Essential Complexity

4 months ago

The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?

Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

4 months ago

Science and technology ASU study points to origin of cumulative culture in human evolution Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge through social learning around 600,000 years ago Stone tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years. Left: First tim...

Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

4 months ago

〰️ it’s weird to look back; I sometimes get confused on how I got here 〰️ Most folks dream of being entrepreneur; “a path that seemed inevitable“, they say. None of that shit applies to me. I’m only here cause I kept getting laid off and that nonsense infuriated me. I treated my first layoff ... Rea...

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

4 months ago

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, ...

Voyager Spacecraft and Fortran 5

4 months ago

The Voyager program took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to send two spacecraft on a tour of the solar system's gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In addition to the cameras and scientific instruments, each Voyager has 3 computers (plus their backups, for a total of 6):

Do you still count on your fingers?

4 months ago

I fell in love with numbers some time before I began going to school. I loved arithmetic from day one. I was one of those horrible people who were good at maths at school and actually enjoyed doing…

The Theft of the Ghent Altarpiece

4 months ago

Missing Pieces The Theft of the Ghent Altarpiece When a priceless altarpiece was stolen from a Belgian cathedral it sparked a 90-year hunt. The crime remains unsolved. Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 6 June 2024 Early on the morning of 11 April 1934 the sacristan of St Bav...

Book: Just Enough Software Architecture

4 months ago

This is the book I wish I had when I started developing software. At the time, there were books on languages and books on object-oriented programming, but few books on design. Knowing the features of the C++ language does not mean you can design a good object-oriented system, nor does knowing the Un...

Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale

4 months ago

At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter t...

The Sociological Study of Mental Illness: A Historical Perspective (2016)

4 months ago

Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, “is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects.” It is precisely the many social and cultural dimensions of ment...

Useful and Overlooked Skills

4 months ago

On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…

Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

4 months ago

Tesla's FSD - a Useless Technology Demo May 20, 2024 Introduction Rules of Engagement Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles) Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles) Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile) Conclusion Introduction In the past month...

Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read

4 months ago

This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daught...

Sidebar Is Taking a Break

4 months ago

I started Sidebar in the fall of 2012. At the time my vision was to create a “Hacker News for design”, a place where designers could come to showcase their work and discover new resources.

Why I Bought an Encyclopedia

4 months ago

NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, 'The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…

The Art of the Epigraph

4 months ago

I didn't have a great need to write that story, but the quote would have fit it so perfectly I actually have an unfinished draft somewhere in my discarded Word documents.

Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?

4 months ago

As a nerdy teen I hated neural networks in data science because I couldn’t train one to multiply two-digit numbers and had a friend who wanted to build a movie scene detector like Shazam did with songs, which I couldn’t do no matter how I tried — perceptual hashing + NNs — it was too early. I believ...

Edward C. Stone, 1936-2024

4 months ago

Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.

Notational Intelligence (2022)

4 months ago

I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far mo...

Welcome to the Era of Garbage Film and Television Streaming

5 months ago

Private equity and monopoly capitalists will destroy anything to make a buck, and they’ve turned their sights on TV and film. If you hated cable’s high prices, endless ads, and copycat programming, you’re going to loathe the future of streaming.

It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

5 months ago

Skip to main content Advertisement PLOS Mental Health Publish Submissions Submission Guidelines Figures Tables Supporting Information LaTeX What We Publish Preprints Revising Your Manuscript Submit Now Calls for Papers Policies Best Practices in Research Reporting Human Subjects Research Animal Rese...

The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

5 months ago

The Functional Programming Hiring Problem June 9, 2024 | 20 min. read If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypotheti...

On being brought up by libertarian economists

5 months ago

The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was ...

Heretical thoughts about science and society

5 months ago

1. The Need for Heretics In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encourag...