Bits (microblog)

🕑 Feb 4, 2025

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

-- Jeff Hammerbacher

🕑 Feb 3, 2025

Writing a Wasm interpreter in C

https://irreducible.io/blog/my-wasm-interpreter/

🕑 Feb 3, 2025

Coding is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time.

-- Fred Brooks

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
(a nice write-up on privacy issues with mobile apps)

https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

Tools for 2025

http://yosemitesam.ch/3-tools-for-2025/

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.

-- Douglas Crockford

🕑 Feb 1, 2025

Thoughts on the software industry

https://linus.coffee/note/software-industry/

🕑 Feb 1, 2025

What is programming? Some people call it a science, some people call it an art, some people call it a skill. I think it has aspects of all three.

-- Charles Simonyi

🕑 Jan 31, 2025

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

https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/ugliest-beautiful-codebase

🕑 Jan 31, 2025

A skilled programmer is like a poet who can put into words those ideas that others find inexpressible.

-- Danny Hillis

🕑 Jan 30, 2025

One man's error is another man's data.

🕑 Jan 30, 2025

In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.

-- Butler Lampson

🕑 Jan 29, 2025

Be humble, communicate clearly, and respect others. It costs nothing to be kind, but the impact is priceless.

-- Addy Osmani

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

A few months of writing code can save you a few hours in design.

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

I’ve got this need to program. I wake up in the morning with sentences of a literate program. Before breakfast -- I’m sure poets must feel this -- I have to go to the computer and write this paragraph and then I can eat and I’m happy.

-- Donald Knuth

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

My afternoon project turned into four days of AI lies, USB chaos, and hard lessons

https://nemo.foo/blog/day-4-of-an-afternoon-project

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Making things easy is hard.

-- Ted Nelson

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Dualities in functional programming

https://dicioccio.fr/on-dualities.html

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Over half of the time you spend working on a project is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you.

-- Richard P. Gabriel

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

Does current AI represent a dead end?

A good TLDR on the current state of things: https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end/

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

JavaScript is the only language that I'm aware of that people feel they don't need to learn before they start using it.

-- Douglas Crockford

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

Immutability Changes Everything (Pat Helland, 2016):

web version: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2884038
pdf: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2857274.2884038

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 and how it works:

http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

File systems: The original hypermedia

https://jon.work/og/

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

http://sebastianmihai.com/snowdrop/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet

https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.

-- Robert C. Martin

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Ignore the grifters - AI isn't going to kill the software industry

https://dustinewers.com/ignore-the-grifters/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code

A good intro to text search: https://bart.degoe.de/building-a-full-text-search-engine-150-lines-of-code/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

This is interesting - two QR codes overlaid in such a way that a reader randomly catches one or the other:

https://mstdn.social/@isziaui/113874436953157913

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Taking a look at compression algorithms
(dissecting various compression algorithms)

https://cefboud.github.io/posts/compression/

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Out of the Tar Pit (2006)

This is one of my favorite computer science papers: https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Most influential papers in computer science history

https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/the-7-most-influential-papers-in-computer-science-history/

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Creating a highly-integrated open-source laptop from scratch

https://www.byran.ee/posts/creation/

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

Minimal 64x4 home computer - a DIY home computer with VGA and PS/2 and 4x(!) the processing power of a Commodore C64 or Apple II.

https://github.com/slu4coder/Minimal-64x4-Home-Computer

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

Simple CPU design

http://simplecpudesign.com

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSEQfqNYNAc

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle

Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/investigating-an-evil-rj45-dongle

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 20, 2025

It's time to make computing personal again.

How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

🕑 Jan 20, 2025

One man's constant is another man's variable.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 19, 2025

Booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

🕑 Jan 19, 2025

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 30, 2024

Think twice before you start programming or you will program twice before you start thinking.

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

A filter that blocks AI spam and bad websites from appearing in search results via uBlocklist:

https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

Write your own static site generator

https://g9h.io/write-your-own-static-site-generator.html

🕑 Jan 17, 2025

SQL NULLs are weird

https://raymondtukpe.com/sql-nulls-are-weird.html

🕑 Jan 17, 2025

Let's say you've got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these "AI" models burn. Nepenthes has what you need.

Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

🕑 Jan 16, 2025

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

-- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

🕑 Jan 15, 2025

If you own a computing device outright, you should be able to make any level of software modification you desire. Hardware manufacturers should not be allowed to absolutely restrict distribution of software to their own channels under the guise of safety.

https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access

🕑 Jan 14, 2025

Greppability is an underrated code metric

https://morizbuesing.com/blog/greppability-code-metric/

🕑 Jan 14, 2025

If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.

-- Khayri R.R. Woulfe

🕑 Jan 14, 2025

You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

🕑 Jan 13, 2025

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

-- John Gall

🕑 Jan 12, 2025

Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/04/cruft/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42599102

🕑 Jan 11, 2025

Programming is mostly thinking (2014)

https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2014/09/programming-is-mostly-thinking.html

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103407

🕑 Jan 11, 2025

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 11, 2025

"You do not need to know how useState works"

I feel like you eventually do. The issue with React is that it's a type of abstraction that seems ill-suited for how the web works under the hood, so it's incredibly leaky. Everything seems to make sense [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687963

🕑 Jan 10, 2025

You can't build interactive web apps except as single page applications... and other myths

https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/

🕑 Jan 9, 2025

Operating System in 1,000 Lines: Intro
(building a small operating system from scratch, step by step)

https://operating-system-in-1000-lines.vercel.app/en/

🕑 Jan 9, 2025

Thus spake the master programmer: "A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell."

-- Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming

🕑 Jan 8, 2025

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

-- Rob Pike

🕑 Jan 8, 2025

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

-- Rob Pike

🕑 Jan 7, 2025

(Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

🕑 Jan 7, 2025

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy.

-- Rob Pike

🕑 Jan 7, 2025

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

-- Rob Pike

🕑 Jan 6, 2025

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

-- Rob Pike

🕑 Jan 5, 2025

"If you've ever worked on refactoring or improving performance in a software system, you've probably run into a particular frustration: abstraction-heavy codebases. What looks like neatly organized and modularized code often reveals itself as a labyrinth, with layers [...]"

https://fhur.me/posts/2024/thats-not-an-abstraction

🕑 Jan 5, 2025

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

-- Richard Stallman

🕑 Jan 4, 2025

Software design is knowledge building

https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557255

🕑 Jan 4, 2025

The road to hell is paved with NAND gates.

-- J. Gooding

🕑 Jan 2, 2025

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.

-- Kent Beck

🕑 Dec 30, 2024

As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.

🕑 Dec 28, 2024

Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.

-- Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering

🕑 Dec 27, 2024

Absolutely nothing should be concluded from these figures except that no conclusion can be drawn from them.

-- Joseph L. Brothers, Linux/PowerPC Project

🕑 Dec 26, 2024

...you might as well skip the Xmas celebration completely, and instead sit in front of your linux computer playing with the all-new-and-improved linux kernel version.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Dec 25, 2024

Why is more important than how.

-- The second law of software architecture

🕑 Dec 23, 2024

Everything in software architecture is a trade-off.

-- The first law of software architecture

🕑 Dec 22, 2024

Users are a terrible thing. Systems would be infinitely more stable without them.

-- Michael T. Nygard

🕑 Dec 21, 2024

This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Dec 20, 2024

What I cannot build, I do not understand.

-- Richard Feynman

🕑 Dec 19, 2024

Well-designed components are easy to replace. Eventually, they will be replaced by ones that are not so easy to replace.

-- Sustrik's Law