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I was seven words away from being spear-phished
Three weeks ago I received a very flattering email from the University of Cambridge, asking me to judge the Adam Smith Prize for Economics:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 439 posts.
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An opinionated approach to GNU Make
Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.
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Zero Cost Abstractions
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
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How does Apple privately find offline devices?
At Monday’s WWDC conference, Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone”, which uses cellular communication and the lost…
276
Software Below the Poverty Line
Open Source Freelancer
277
Modern Alternatives to PGP
Did your last Yubikey just break? Perhaps you forgot an offline backup password. Maybe you’re just tired of living like a spy and never using smartphones. Whatever it is, you’re here, and you’re finally ready to give up on PGP. That’s great! We’re here to help! No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway, so that’s…
278
The sad state of personal data and infrastructure
Why can't we have nice digital things?
279
I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
7 years ago I wrote an article about speed reading. Turns out I made a lot of mistakes. Discover why speed reading might not be as useful as expected.
280
Climbing the Wealth Ladder
On the 6 levels of wealth and why affluence increases in steps.
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
283
Viewing Matrices and Probability as Graphs
Today I'd like to share an idea. It's a very simple idea. It's not fancy and it's certainly not new. In fact, I'm sure many of you have thought about it already. But if you haven't—and even if you have!—I hope you'll take a few minutes to enjoy it with me. Here's the idea: Every matrix corresponds to a graph. So…
284
Color Spaces
Interactive article explaining color spaces and how they're used to express color.
285
Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
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Syntax highlighters are wrong (2014)
Syntax highlighters make value judgments about code. Most highlighters judge that comments are cruft, and try to hide them. Most diff viewers judge that code deletions are bad.
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Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
288
Overview of Rust error handling libraries
Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.
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Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
290
OpenBSD: Why and How (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Typestates in Rust (2018)
A long time ago, the Rust language was a language with typestate. Officially, typestates were dropped long before Rust 1.0. In this entry, I’ll get you in on the worst kept secret of the Rust community: Rust still has typestates.
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XML is almost always misused
In 1996, XML was invented. No sooner than it was created, it was adopted for all manner of misconceived applications for which it was a poor choice.
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Network Transparency with Wayland
M. Stoeckl's website
294
Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
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A walk through the Magit interface
Blog of Jonas Bernoulli
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Interpretable Machine Learning
Machine learning is part of our products, processes, and research. But computers usually don’t explain their predictions , which can cause many problems, ranging from trust issues to undetected bugs. This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable.
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The soul of a new computer company
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle , we have started Oxide Computer Company .
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Why Windows 10 Sucks or Everything Wrong with Microsoft Windows
It's funny and equally sad that year 2015 marks the end of the Windows OS for a lot of people. There are several issues with Windows which, at present, make Spyware/ Malware OS 10 inappropriate and even outright dangerous for a lot of people. The most egregious, of course, is a total abandonment of any form of privacy…