Postgres as queue
leontrolski – postgres as queue ⇦ The team I’ve been working in for the last year or so have had great success using Postgres-as-queue. We’ve managed to avoid the following: Infrastructure/configuration – I’d estimate each line of terraform to be an order of magnitude more risk/maintenance/faff than each line of Python. Slow/crunky multi-container testing. The […]
A 2024 plea for lean software
08 Feb 2024 10 min read Daniel Zender This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away 1 January 2024. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software,” published in Computer, the magazine for members of the IEEE Computer Society, which I read […]
Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps
Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch. Nine states have […]
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds
08 Feb 2024 3 min read These simulated quadrotors learn to fly in just 18 seconds—which can then enable a real quadrotor to do the same. It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the past decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or […]
Scientists find optimal space-time balance for hash tables
Introduction About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science. Luhn already held several patents, including one for a device that could measure a cloth’s thread count and another for a guide that determined what mixed drinks you could make from the ingredients in your […]
What Turned Earth into a Giant Snowball 700M Years Ago?
Snowball Earth – Artist’s concept – NASA.gov Australian geologists have used plate tectonic modelling to determine what most likely caused an extreme ice-age climate in Earth’s history, more than 700 million years ago. The study, published in Geology, helps our understanding of the functioning of the Earth’s built-in thermostat that prevents the Earth from getting […]
Benchmarking latency across common wireless links for microcontrollers
Scott I was recently trying to quantify the tradeoffs in user-experience for a wireless product and successfully nerd-sniped myself into evaluating a super-set of wireless modules and protocols. While standards groups, radio chipset vendors, and IOT system integrators happily talk about improvements to bandwidth, long-range capabilities, or how low their power consumption is, I’ve really […]
Mysterious, higher energy yields in vertical PV systems
Scientists in the Netherlands have sought to understand the reason for unexpected gains in vertical PV systems and found that these installations have a much higher heat transfer coefficient than their horizontally deployed counterparts. November 10, 2023 Emiliano Bellini A group of researchers at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) has conducted a […]
Show HN: Presentations for your webcam, not a projector
Here’s a demo of how you could use CueCam on a sales call. I’d made a note about a comment my client made on the last call in the CRM and put it into my teleprompter so I didn’t really have to remember their child’s name I had some language in the teleprompter to make […]
Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed
Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed | I’m trying some experimental tiers on Patreon to see if I can get to substack-like levels of financial support for this blog without moving to substack! On large platforms, it’s impossible to have policies on things like moderation, […]