Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
If you are going to work remotely anywhere in Australia from a van, you need damn good internet. Here's how I put together a vehicle with the best internet connectivity in Australia.
Like making engineering students squirm? Have them explain convolution and (if you're barbarous) the convolution theorem. They'll mutter something about…
This is a song about culture wars, futurism, apocalypta, and gun math. Click to read Handwaving Freakoutery, by BJ Campbell, a Substack publication.
Identifying them as such only lets companies like OpenAI off the hook.
tl;dr: dd works for reading and writing disks, but it has no "low level I/O" capabilities that make it more suited for this than any other shell utility. Like cat you should use it where it makes sense, e.g. to take advantage of its wide array of options, rather than try to ensure that all disk related commands begin…
How my quest to make a business card sized raytracer got a little out of hand.
<p>For years I’ve noodled around with various setups for a Python development environment. A couple of years ago <a href="https://jacobian.org/2018/feb/21/python-environment-2018/">I wrote about a setup I finally liked</a>; this is an update to that post.</p> <p>Bad news: this stuff still isn’t stable, and…
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
I run FreeBSD as my daily driver on both my main workstation and on all my servers and I have been running FreeBSD since about 1999 because I consider it an amazing operating system. In this article I will address some of the technical reasons for choosing FreeBSD over a GNU/Linux distribution.
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table. This came about because last year I wrote the fastest hash table (I still make that claim) and this year one of the organizers of the C++Now conference asked…
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them.
For the past few years, we have seen a lot of discussions around the concept of the Software Supply Chain. These discussions started around the time of LeftPad and escalated with multiple incidents in the past few years. The problem of all the work in this domain is that it forgets a fundamental point.
The 'how' and 'why' of CORS, from start to finish.
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce
Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive…
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
elementary founder: "I might take some time off from Linux or join another community maybe"
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
... in which we check if your password has been compromised in many inconvenient ways, in a tale of destruction, obsession, and self-discovery.
This is HUGE.
telegra.ph/why-using-whatsapp-is-dangerous-01-30-42020381 points234 commentscited by 3Security & Privacy details
A few months ago I wrote about a WhatsApp backdoor that allowed hackers to access all data on any phone running WhatsApp [1]. Facebook, its parent company, claimed at the time that they had no proof the flaw had ever been used by attackers [2]. Last week it became clear that this backdoor had been exploited to extract…
This blog seeks to expose some of the myths about our present criminal justice system, myths that have risen to prominence again following publication of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) consultation …
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
