Technology Commentary

Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz, July 5, 2024

"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...

I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent’s medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS.The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address allocation, it just worked. Eventually the PCs would run Windows, and a Windows NT server took over file sharing over TCP/IP. The business software survived this transition unchanged, though there was more operational overhead. We assigned IPs manually.

We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.

The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is going on today. It’s an over-the-top presentation meant to draw people into sport. And for the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing people from all across …

We heard a story that after the recent hurricane, a man noted that while the house was sweltering hot because the power was still out, his kids were more anxious for the internet to come back onlin…

The demoscene has provided our community with its artistic outlet since the first computers which could handle graphics, and has stayed at the forefront of technology all the way. For all that thou…

I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes

I recently published heckorator on pypi. It’s a cursed little project to make Python decorators more readable. But I actually started (and abandoned) the project 4 years ago!

An overview of all the tools, standards and special languages used in the automotive industry where the official language is actually C.

In a recently uncovered 1983 speech, Steve Jobs predicted the ubiquity of personal computers. In 2024, AI has brought us to another inflection point.

This one weird trick saved countless hours and stress – no, really

Science and engineering usually create consistent results. Generally, when you figure out how to make something, you can repeat that at will to make more of something. But what if, one day, you ran…

Build your own AI app without hassle.

Software engineers are not (and should not be) technicians I don’t actually think predictability is a goo...

There might be a very simple explanation for why the masses have yet to adopt Linux as their desktop operating system, which the open-source community won't like.

I had to bite my tongue and not comment on this tweet from FTC Chair Lina Khan, who tried to make the current CrowdStrike situation a crisis because of “big tech” and “consolidation.” “How is it th…

Reflections on six decades of relations with computers

Many people, one way or another, got started programming computers using some kind of Basic. The language was developed at Dartmouth specifically so people could write simple programs without much …

When I got my first computer, a second hand 386 running MS-DOS 6.22, I didn’t have an Internet connection. But I did have QuickBASIC installed and a stack of programming magazines the local library…

Suppose you decide you want to become a novelist. You enroll in the Hackaday Famous Novelists School where your instructor announces that since all truly great novels are written in Russian, our fi…

Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala) When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that

A lack of comprehensive data strategies among Global 2000 enterprises is curtailing use of AI tools and undermining business goals, according to research. Nearly 85 percent of enterprise leaders agree that effective data management significantly drives top line, bottom line, and shareholder value, but they believe “over 40 percent” of their organizational data is “unusable.” […]

A new documentary from Eminem explores how the internet changed music forever. And diving into vintage CDs reveals just how much we lost in the process.

Paramount+’s new music docuseries How Music Got Free tells the story of how piracy nearly destroyed the music industry, and how it survived.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy is a non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill and Harald Popp to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted. Witt also documents the rise of the warez scene and spread of copyright-infringing efforts online while detailing the campaigns by music industry executives such as Doug Morris to adapt to changing technology.

A two-part docuseries looks back at the history of piracy and how the music industry found itself in such a precarious place

Re-visiting the Napster era, Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free has been adapted into a two-part documentary on Paramount+. But the documentary's director believes "The real innovative minds here were a bunch of rogue teenagers and a guy working a blue-collar factory job in the tiny town of ...