Figure out who’s leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
One common element of the larger places where I’ve worked is that they tend to have a directory service of some sort that keeps track of who’s an employee and who isn’t. You can learn some interesting things by periodically dumping that list and then running comparisons against the previous dump. A certain company had […]
What’s new in the Postgres 16 query planner (a.k.a. optimizer)
PostgreSQL 16 introduces quite a few improvements to the query planner and makes many SQL queries run faster than they did on previous versions of PostgreSQL. If you look at the PG16 release notes, you’ll see some of these planner improvements. But with the volume of changes made in each PostgreSQL release, it’s not possible […]
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
Official White House Photo/Wang Huning observes as Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama, Toronto This article by N.S. Lyons was originally published on Palladium Magazine on October 11, 2021. It was featured in PALLADIUM 09: Political Outcomes. One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses […]
Imbue (Formerly Generally Intelligent) (YC S17) Is Hiring
Imbue (F.K.A. Generally Intelligent) is an AI research company working directly on building human-level general machine intelligence that can learn naturally in the way humans do. Our mission is to understand the fundamentals of learning and build safe, humane machine intelligence. Here are our open roles: Machine Learning Engineer (SF or Remote, Contract or Full-time): […]
Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024
[This article is the companion to my presentation for CodeBEAM America 2024, Elixir is the One-Person Stack for Building a Software Startup. You can download the slides as a PDF or view them in Google Slides.] I’d like to share why I chose Elixir as the programming language (and really, as we’ll discuss, the full […]
Walter Shawlee, the Sovereign of Slide Rules, Is Dead at 73
Used by engineers for centuries, they were displaced by pocket calculators and all but forgotten until Mr. Shawlee created a subculture of obsessives and cornered the market. For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative hand-held computer was something called a slide rule. As typewriters once symbolized the writer, slide rules symbolized the engineer. These analog […]
Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft
Canada Border Services Agency The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) provides critical support to law enforcement partners to disrupt, investigate and ultimately prosecute these crimes. Upfront, preventative and investigative work—within Canada, ahead of reaching the border—is imperative to reduce auto theft overall. The CBSA acts on 100% of referrals from local police and works closely […]
Multics and AS400：DPS8M on IBM PASE for I (OS/400)
Finally, you can run dozens of multiprocessing Multics instances along side your mission-critical IBM AIX (PASE) and IBM i (OS/400) workloads on IBM Power Systems hardware! “DPS8M/400” This is the virtualization solution your IT department has been waiting for… well, perhaps it isn’t — but supporting this platform is a great demonstration of both the […]
Doorway effect
The ‘doorway effect’ or ‘location updating effect’ is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.[1] We tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary[2] and often forget what we were thinking about or planning on doing upon […]
Reflex (YC W23) Founding Developer Advocate
The role We’re looking for a fantastic SF/Bay Area-based Developer Advocate to educate our community about our open-source projects. This includes our Reflex open source framework, our hosting service, as well as some new projects we are releasing. Our community is at the core of our company and you’ll play a critical role growing and […]