What if you had to fight against your company’s culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover’s idea faced resistance from a company that favored graphical interfaces.

source: HN

There are many things to take from this story — about beginner’s mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás’ experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE.

source: HN

Today, the team declared victory. They’ve finally verified the true value of a number called BB(5), which quantifies just how busy that fifth beaver is. They obtained the result — 47,176,870 — using a piece of software called the Coq proof assistant, which certifies that mathematical proofs are free of errors.

source: HN

A customer reported that a recent Windows update broke their ability to type a snowman by using Alt+9731. We explained that the update was not at fault; rather, Alt+9731 was never supposed to produce a snowman at all! But the customer insisted that it used to work.

source: HN

The Valve.Computer is an 8 bit computer, with the usual 12 bit address and data buses plus the rather unusual current demand of over 200 Amps. It can play a decent game of PONG using its valve and relay RAM, or run a 32 bit Fibonacci sequence using modern NVRAM. After switch on you have to wait a while for the last thermionic valve to warm up. If you look from the side you see a few start to show a red glow.

After visiting Bletchley Park, it occurred to me that several thermionic valve computers had been rebuilt, and now run in museums, but that no new design of a valve computer had been constructed in over 50 years. The thought of building one seemed ridiculous, but I wondered if a modern design could overcome the issues of size, power and the very real danger of high voltages.

source: HN

Somehow, neutrinos went from just another random particle to becoming tiny monsters that require multi-billion-dollar facilities to understand. And there’s just enough mystery surrounding them that we feel compelled to build those facilities since neutrinos might just tear apart the entire particle physics community at the seams.

It started out innocently enough. Nobody asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos, but there they were in our early particle experiments. Occasionally, heavy atomic nuclei spontaneously—and for no good reason—transform themselves, with either a neutron converting into a proton or vice-versa. As a result of this process, known as beta decay, the nucleus also emits an electron or its antimatter partner, the positron.

There was just one small problem: Nothing added up. The electrons never came out of the nucleus with the same energy; it was a little different every time. Some physicists argued that our conceptions of the conservation of energy only held on average, but that didn’t feel so good to say out loud, so others argued that perhaps there was another, hidden particle participating in the transformations. Something, they argued, had to sap energy away from the electron in a random way to explain this.

source: ars

I, sadly, did not get a message from a teenage YouTuber earnestly offering to return my stolen phone. Instead I received a series of texts from someone cycling through a number of different strategies for engaging, convincing, tricking or scaring me into unlocking the phone for them.

source: HN

A new ant species, Paraparatrechina neela sp. nov., with a captivating metallic-blue color is described based on the worker caste from the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh, northeastern India. This discovery signifies the first new species of Paraparatrechina in 121 years, since the description of the sole previously known species, P. aseta (Forel, 1902), in the Indian subcontinent.

source: HN

Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware accelerated stack trace capturing via shadow stacks.

source: HN

wazero is an extremely unique and rare piece of production software out there in the Go ecosystem in the sense that it generates semantically equivalent x86-64 and AArch64 machine code from WebAssembly bytecode at runtime, and then provides the API to execute and interact with it with zero dependency, hence without CGo.

This post is decoupled from wazero itself, and I’ll focus on the general concept of runtime code generation and execution in Go.

source: HN

A tiny raycasting engine and city generator that fits in a standalone 256 byte html file. In this post I will share all the secrets about how this magical program works.

source: HN

The zoning policy for the property prohibits fast food, but allows exceptions for restaurants whose primary business is to sell “made-to-order” or Subway-style sandwiches. A city commission denied the request.

But Famous Taco, Bobay ruled, is allowed at the shopping center because it would serve “Mexican-style sandwiches,” and the zoning policy “does not restrict potential restaurants to only American cuisine-style sandwiches.” Hypothetically, other restaurants that serve made-to-order items, including “Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps or Vietnamese banh mi,” would also be allowed, Bobay wrote in his decision.

Most of the time, Chile’s Atacama Desert is gritty, cracked, and red. The desert gets less than 0.6 inch (1.5 cm) of rain per year, the equivalent of six or so hours of light drizzle. Sometimes it doesn’t get any at all. Generally, the only plants living here have lucked out with real estate, growing near one of the rare streams or groundwater reserves or along the fog-ribboned coast.

Other years, though, are just a little bit damper, juiced by El Niño, a weather pattern that increases rain in the Americas. With a few drops more water, trillions of seeds sleeping just under the sand begin to stir. They send up shoots, which grow leaves and buds. Eventually, whole swaths of the desert let loose, unfolding in yellow, pink, orange, and purple, the colors sweeping across the desert like watercolors, and the petals more numerous than the stars above.

The Little 500 has been a mainstay at Indiana University for decades, inspiring a movie and the entire campus. Here’s how this year’s dramatic race unfolded.

In this post I want to create a single file C file program to open a windows inside Linux without using xlib or any similar libraries. The idea is to explore X11 protocol and see how it is used to interact with X server to create windows.

source: HN

It’s a game we’d been dreaming of for years: a giant rube goldberg machine builder in the style of the classic Incredible Machine games, made of a patchwork of machines created by individual xkcd readers. For more details, check out Explain xkcd’s wonderful writeup.

source: HN

Computers aren’t random. On the contrary, hardware designers work very hard to make sure computers run every program the same way every time. So when a program does need random numbers, that requires extra effort. Traditionally, computer scientists and programming languages have distinguished between two different kinds of random numbers: statistical and cryptographic randomness. In Go, those are provided by math/rand and crypto/rand, respectively. This post is about how Go 1.22 brings the two closer together, by using a cryptographic random number source in math/rand (as well as math/rand/v2, as mentioned in our previous post). The result is better randomness and far less damage when developers accidentally use math/rand instead of crypto/rand.

source: HN

The plaintiffs are Silicon Valley legend Steve Wozniak, who had his YouTube account hijacked, and 17 scammed individuals. The plaintiffs sued YouTube. YouTube defended on Section 230 grounds. The lower court dismissed the entire complaint due to 230. On appeal, the appellate court doesn’t analyze the multitudinous causes of action individually. Instead, the appeals court analyzes six different theories the plaintiffs advanced to explain why Section 230 shouldn’t apply. The court finds that Section 230 applies to all six theories and upholds the dismissal, though with one theory, the plaintiffs get another chance to try again.

https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/H050042.PDF

GPS is perhaps one of the most audacious geo-engineering feats ever undertaken, and its traces can be felt with just an antenna and a motive.

All that said, it’s not as though there’s a cacophony of navigation data swarming around you, deafening if you could just hear it. In reality, the GPS signals surrounding you are astoundingly weak. To take an analogy: imagine a normal light bulb, like the one that might be above you now. Pull it twenty thousand kilometers away from the room you’re in, and have it flash, on, off, on, off, a million times a second. Imagine straining your eye to watch the shimmer of the bulb, two Earths away, and listen to what it’s telling you.

source: trivium