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Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4472
Feed the bots
A week ago , I set up a dynamically generated nonsense maze to catch LLM scrapers. Now, requests to it make up 99.9% of my server's traffic, but my total request volume did not increase. The bots didn't come to my site because of the trap.
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Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
Facebook gave one of the worst keynotes in a long time: there was no vision, just the adoption of Snap’s. It’s the inevitable outcome of a monopoly.
4475
FTX Contagion
Charting the FTX collapse.
4476
Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
Why self-host Zig?<br> For great justice, of course… and also a few more reasons actually.
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ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
4479
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
4480
Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
4481
How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button
UPDATE: I’m now selling ready-to-use buttons at Buttonjoy.com!
4482
A US Visa in 937 Days
Here's the complete timeline of events. From my first denial to travel to the US until I eventually received a tourist visa. And then I can't go anyway. December 5-11, 2016 I spent a week on Hawaii with Mozilla - my employer at the time. This was my 12th visit to the US over a … Continue reading a US visa in 937 days →
4483
Zombie Startups
My greatest fear as a startup founder isn’t to fail, it is to become a zombie startup.
4484
Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast.
4485
Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output
Why you should escape output correctly, but generally not sanitize user input.
4486
LG Smart TVs log USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen. After some investigation, I f...
4487
Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
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Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
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Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and…
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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
4493
Finding the “second bug” in glibc’s condition variable
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_s…
4494
An experimental real world adblock
Corporate branding and advertisements are ubiquitous in society today and almost impossible to avoid. What if we lived in a world where consumers were blind to this surplus of corporate branding? Brand Killer is a technology demonstration that envisions a future in which consumers can use augmented reality to opt out…
4495
The sad state of personal data and infrastructure
Why can't we have nice digital things?
4496
Google's Backdoor Access System into Gmail Accounts
Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated—we knew…
4497
The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)
A Hackernews comment introduces a new character
4498
“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
4499
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
4500
We need less powerful languages
We need languages and systems that are less powerful, not more powerful, and easy ways to create and use such languages.