Ranjit Mathew

I *so* want to travel once again across Japan. 😩

What happened to Fry's Electronics Fry's had been struggling for years but it was still a bit of a surprise to see it go

I’ve spent several hours a day in the Fry’s in Sunnyvale 🥲 – these days, the Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara comes close 🤩:

“What Happened To Fry’s Electronics”, Dave Farquhar (dfarq.homeip.net/what-happene...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714...

#Frys #Electronics #Nostalgia #Stores

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published Imagine you could talk to Hieronymus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Revelation, or of the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre 15th century text written in an uncrackable code; that you could solve centuri...

The “Codex Seraphinianus” by Luigi Serafini has fascinated me for 3+ decades now:

“An Introduction To The Codex Seraphinianus, The Strangest Book Ever Published”, Open Culture (www.openculture.com/2026/02/an-i...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712...

#Books #CodexSeraphinianus

The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan As loneliness deepens in one of the world's fastest-ageing nations, a network of women delivering probiotic milk drinks has become a vital source of routine, connection and care.

Fascinating:

“The Yoghurt Delivery Women Combatting Loneliness In Japan”, BBC (www.bbc.com/travel/artic...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728...

#Japan #OldAge #Yakult #Loneliness #Yoghurt #Curd #Probiotic #GutHealth #Women

A trip down a memory lane 😎:

“DOS Memory Management”, Michal Necasek (www.os2museum.com/wp/dos-memor...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4719...

#DOS #MSDOS #RetroComputing #MemoryManagement #PC #IBMPC #OldSkool #Nostalgia

Reading English from 1000 AD The past was not as foreign as we think.

“Reading English From 1000 AD”, Lewis Campbell (lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260224....).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713...

#English #Language #History #Writing #OldEnglish #Linguistics #AngloSaxons #England

A comment in the ensuing HN discussion (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710...), made me subscribe 🎧 to the excellent 👌🏽 “The History Of English” #podcast by Kevin Stroud:

historyofenglishpodcast.com

An amazing exploration of the #history of the #English #language and speakers.

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

What a ride down #English language #History 🤩:

“How Far Back In Time Can You Understand English?”, Colin Gorrie (www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706...

#Languages #Linguistics #Writing #OldEnglish #MiddleEnglish #England

Don't become an Engineering Manager Over drinks a few weeks ago, a friend told me he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role.

Hmm…🧐:

“Don’t Become An Engineering Manager”, Anton Zaides (newsletter.manager.dev/p/dont-becom...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4723...

#Career #Manager #EM #EngineeringManager #Work #ProjectManager #Management #Tech

The Home Computer War In 1979, Atari and Texas Instruments (TI) established a new category of computer, which hybridized the features of the personal computer and video game console. Like a video game system, they had d…

Very nice:

“The Home Computer War”, Christopher Felix McDonald (technicshistory.com/2026/03/06/t...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726...

#RetroComputing #OldSkool #Nostalgia #HomeComputers #MicroComputers #ComputerHistory #8Bits

The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should Forget fear of public speaking. A lot of people now shy away completely from speaking to anyone in public. But if we learn to do this it’s enriching, for ourselves and society

Shedding this inhibition is important, even if you’re not an extrovert:

“The Stranger Secret: How To Talk To Anyone – And Why You Should”, The Guardian (www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721...

#Talking #Listening #Life #Conversation #Strangers #Isolation

Sliced by Go’s Slices Today, I was sliced by Go’s slices. Actually, by Go’s variadics. Question: what does this snippet print? func main() { nums := []int{1, 2, 3} …

Slices combine a mutable vector with a (seemingly) read-only view – a big mistake in #Go, leading to the foot-guns here & in the discussions 😓:

“Sliced By Go’s Slices”, Ohad Ravid (ohadravid.github.io/posts/2026-0...).

Via Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/o3cpxf/sli...

#Programming #GoLang #PLDI

#PSA: Wait for the food-poisoning to kick in before rating an outlet on #Swiggy – they don’t let you change it later. 😒

Take photos of all dishes before eating – Swiggy demands it to report food-safety issues. 😠

O4H (Order For Health): Never ordering from them again! 😡

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things

Oh man! This hits hard 😢:

“I Started Programming When I Was 7. I’m 50 Now, And The Thing I Loved Has Changed”, James Randall (www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_th...)

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/7iford/i_s...

#Programming #Coding #Nostalgia #AI #Experience

Blue light filters don’t work Why controlling total luminance is a better bet

Interesting (but controversial in the HN comments 😬):

“Blue Light Filters Don’t Work”, Patrick Mineault, NeuroAI (www.neuroai.science/p/blue-light...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709...

#Sleep #Health #Brain #CircadianRhythm #BlueLight #NightShift #DarkMode #Light #Eyes

Nice article, but the all-lowercase titling is so jarring:

“Six Thoughts On Generating C”, Andy Wingo (wingolog.org/archives/202...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/j8jnqq/six...

#Programming #C #PLDI #Compilers #CodeGeneration #ProgramSynthesis

Another excellent post 👌🏽 from Russ Cox 👇🏽🫡:

“Floating-Point Printing And Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast” (research.swtch.com/fp).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4668...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/nbsclr/flo...

#Programming #Math #FloatingPoint #Numbers #PLDI #Parsing #Printing

Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works...

“The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About The Future Of Software”, Chris Lattner (www.modular.com/blog/the-cla...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709... & news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4700...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/wk6rjh/cla...

#LLVM #Compilers #AI #C #ClaudeCCompiler #ClaudeCode

💯!

“Notes On Clarifying Man Pages”, Julia Evans (jvns.ca/blog/2026/02...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/zpifkh/not...

#Unix #Linux #Manuals #ManPages #Documentation #Learning

How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have?

Informative:

“How Many Registers Does An x86-64 CPU Have?” [2020], William Woodruff (blog.yossarian.net/2020/11/30/H...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4701...

#Intel #AMD #x86 #Hardware #CPU #ISA #SIMD #Architecture

Things I’ve learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager Non-obvious advice that I wish I learned sooner.

Nice – I’m not an EM, but this 👇🏽 rings true based on vicarious experience:

“Things I’ve Learned In My 10 Years As An Engineering Manager”, Jampa Uchoa (www.jampa.dev/p/lessons-le...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4670...

#EM #Manager #EngineeringManager #SoftwareEngineering #Advice

What is a nappuccino? - RestWorks Nappuccino is another word for a coffee nap. A nappuccino takes advantage of the synergy effect that arises when caffeine and a power nap are combined. Nappuccino 101 Once your ‘nappuccino’ is finishe...

Some colleagues take a double espresso shot (or a cappuccino) right before their power nap to benefit from the coffee kicking in just as they wake up – it’s apparently called a “Nappuccino” or a “Coffee Nap” (e.g. rest.works/blog/what-is...).

#Naps #Sleep #Coffee #Health

How to get power naps right It’s all in the timing

I’ve always preferred to take afternoon naps (but it isn’t usually feasible on workdays 🥱) – the bit about long naps is concerning 😥:

“How To Get Power Naps Right”, The Economist (www.economist.com/science-and-... or archive.is/Rqz8V).

#Naps #Sleep #Health

Supreme Court is loud and clear on noise pollution Its verdicts on loudspeakers were aimed to protect citizens from becoming ‘forced audience’ to noise

The Supreme Court ruling on noise pollution (e.g. www.thehindu.com/news/nationa...) is *ineffective* and merely *symbolic* if the police is unwilling (or unable) to do anything about it. 😤

#Bangalore #NoisePollution #Religion #JungleRaj

The RRBC Piccassso guys have been *destroying* the peace in the Jayanagar 4th T & 9th Block neighborhoods in Bangalore for *days* with loud religious songs & speech day & night, but neither the police nor the MLA are willing to do anything about it. 😡

#NoisePollution

10 Years of Wasm: A Retrospective In April of 2015, Luke Wagner made the first commits to a new repository called WebAssembly/design, adding a high-level design document for a “binary format to serve as a web compilation target.”

Wonderful:

“10 Years Of Wasm: A Retrospective”, The Bytecode Alliance (bytecodealliance.org/articles/ten...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679...

#Internet #Web #WASM #WebAssembly #Bytecode #VirtualMachine #Mozilla #Google #JavaScript #Portability #Programming #Retrospective

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

The corresponding blog-post 👇🏽, if you don’t want to read the paper 👆🏽:

“How AI Assistance Impacts The Formation Of Coding Skills”, Anthropic (www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682...

#Skills #Expertise #Programming #Coding #AI #Atrophy #SeniorEngineer

How AI Impacts Skill Formation AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively su...

A must-read #paper 👇🏽 if you use #AI to boost your #productivity:

“How AI Impacts Skill Formation”, Judy Hanwen Shen & Alex Tamkin, Anthropic (arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/k6fjcb/how...

#Skills #Expertise #Career

Meet the Italian 'Fruit Detective' Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared From the Kitchen Table Renaissance paintings, medieval archives, cloistered orchards—how one Italian scientist is uncovering secrets that could help combat a growing agricultural crisis

💖🍒🍎🍐:

“Meet The Italian ‘Fruit Detective’ Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings For Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared From The Kitchen Table” [2024], Smithsonian Magazine (www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...).

#Fruits #Italy #Painting #Renaissance #Art #Biodiversity

How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.

“How The Human Brain Contends With The Strangeness Of Zero” [2024], Quanta (www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-huma...).

#Zero #Numbers #Arithmetic #Brain #Math #Mathematics #History #India #Perception #Cognition #Science