Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis (discussed on Hacker News) was a fascinating read. I’ve barely heard about the country before, but it’s certainly a remarkable one: very closed, poor and underdeveloped, mostly living off farming, but it sounds like …
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity is a fascinating essay and historical overview of Ancient Rome that debunks a lot of my believes about that time. Somehow, in high school (where I come from at least) we are taught that Ancient Greece and Rome were advanced societies, and then they collapsed and …
I found Traceroute isn’t real, or: Whoops! Everyone Was Wrong Forever (discussed on Hacker News) a fascinating read, as someone whose knowledge of computer networking is admittedly relatively weak: Traceroute is a filthy hack. I can’t find any proper history of the tool, but my …
A comment in the Trump wins presidency for second time thread on Hacker News I feel like summarized the situation very well: The reason for this [the recent rise of the far-right and populism] isn’t a mystery: the world doesn’t work for the plurality of its populace. The current …
Book Review: Deep Utopia talks about a book (you’ll never guess its title) that asks: What if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted? […] Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people’s lives become boring and meaningless? In our …
I’ve really enjoyed the video Is Our World Broken? from Kurzgesagt. We indeed live in times where the general consensus appears to be that we as a society and as a species are doomed: the world just seems too hard and too bad, and we as individuals are all bombarded with all of this negativity …
The Fastest Mutexes by Justine Tunney (discussed on Hacker News) is an excellent work digging into the performance of commonly used mutex implementations, and presenting a new fast mutex in Cosmopolitan Libc. This kind of stuff underpins virtually every piece of software written, but it is …
Doomsday theories appear to be a popular pastime of humanity, but they come in wildly varying types. One of the types I personally find more concerning are those that have to do with natural limits and use of non-renewable materials and resources. Recently, sand of all things have seen attention in …
Since the excellent The Three-Body Problem book trilogy and the similarly great Netflix adaptation, I have been wondering why exactly is the name-giving physics/mathematics problem called the three-body problem considered unsolvable. Frustratingly, searching on Google didn’t let me find any …
Crashes and Competition (also in video essay format) was written following the CrowdStrike-caused outages worldwide just a few months ago. In a nutshell, the issue was caused by the security software provided CrowdStrike. On Windows, in order for the security software to do its job, it would have to …
Why doesn’t advice work? really hits the nail on the head I feel, and lists most of the common “failure modes” of advice. Obviously go read the article (it’s short!) for the full details, but here is a quick summary: Maybe your advice is bad. Most is. Maybe your advice is …
I don’t normally read or enjoy World War 2-analysis, but Your Book Review: How the War Was Won was an interesting read. The book in question challenges traditional narratives about what exactly allowed the Allies to win WW2, and offers its own less glamorous and heroic explanations that ring …
One of the (many) things that really puts me off about having children is how little consensus exists on anything related to children and child-bearing: can you let your baby cry? What is okay to feed a baby / child? Is a primary/high school necessary or harmful? Is home-schooling any better? Or one …
I Have No Constructor, and I Must Initialize (Hacker News discussion) goes into the gnarly details of initialization in C++, and all the immense, immense complexity and edge cases around it. As the top-voted comment on HN put it: After almost 20 years of experience with C++, there are still some …
An absolute wild read: The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases It is long (a series of articles), but it is very worth reading. The amount of dedication, energy, money, and effort they have spent on this hobby project is truly astonishing, and I think humbling. Here is the intro, to …
In the last post of the Implementing order books in C++ and Rust series I have proposed an unsafe Rust solution. Unfortunately, that solution turns out to invoke undefined behaviour (UB) due to violating the stacked borrows model of Rust. It does appear to work perfectly fine at the moment, but UB …
I have found two very interesting questions and answers on Stack Overflow this week that made me learn something new: How does C++ select the delete operator in case of replacement in subclass?; the answer: the compiler emits two destructors in the vtable: a regular one, and a deleting destructor …
I’ve known from the moment that C++ modules were introduced that the whole thing is the kind of good-idea-turned-into-cursed-“solution” that only a C++ developer could have ever come up with. It has all the hallmarks: it tries to solve a well understood, already solved problem (see …
Money Stuff: Crypto Brothers Front-Ran the Front-Runners talks about a fascinating case, with further details in Money Stuff: The Endless Shrimp Investigation under header “ETH consensus”, the linked CoinDesk article: What the DOJ’s First MEV Lawsuit Means for Ethereum, as well as the …
Easy to make rules. Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done …
Higher RAII, and the Seven Arcane Uses of Linear Types (discussed on Hacker News) introduced me to the concept of linear types and how they can be useful. It turns out: they can be extremely useful, because you can use them to make a promise to do something to the compiler, and it will hold you to …
The Emotional Support Animal Racket talks about emotional support animals and eloquently but succinctly critiques the entire dysfunctional situation. I found this particularly interesting because it provides a very clear example of how processes and systems can fail while their individual components …
Highly recommended reading for C++ developers: An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std::string (discussed on Reddit and Hacker News), which goes into how std::string is implemented by the 3 major compilers: GCC (libstdc++), MSVC, and Clang (libc++), and what design choices …
Money Stuff: Banks Are Still Where the Money Isn’t talks about a curious phenomenon: a big bank (Barclays Plc) struggling to find the money to lend out for its credit cards, and ends up essentially borrowing money from private equity (Blackstone) to do it. Huh?! Isn’t, like, the entire point …
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs (discussed on Hacker News) made me laugh, it is the kind of high-quality trolling that the field of computer science could definitely use more of. It is actually a scientific paper accepted by the SIGBOVIK 2019 conference, and that is glorious. In this …