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Archiving URLs (2019)
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
92
Simplify: move code into database functions
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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CRDTs are the future
I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s
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Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.
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Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)
Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
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An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
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Flatpak: A security nightmare – two years later
Flatpak - a security nightmare
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Catalina is checking notarization of unsigned executables
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
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GPT-3
May 2020 Gwern.net newsletter: GPT-3 scaling, implications, deep theory; anime GAN updates, and 1 book review.
101
Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
102
Division by zero in type theory: a FAQ
How can a theorem prover use the convention that 1/0=0 and still be consistent?
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Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
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Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
105
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage
There is such a thing as a free lunch
106
Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look
Apple’s launch of macOS Big Sur was almost immediately followed by server issues which prevented users from running third-party apps on their computers. While a workaround was soon found by people on Twitter, others raised some privacy concerns related to that issue.
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Linux Hardening Guide
Linux is not a secure operating system . However, there are steps you can take to improve it. This guide aims to explain how to harden Linux as much as possible for security and privacy. This guide attempts to be distribution-agnostic and is not tied to any specific one. DISCLAIMER: Do not attempt to apply anything in…
108
Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet
tldr: work has started to make Hyper work as a backend in curl for HTTP. curl and its data transfer core, libcurl, is all written in C. The language C is known and infamous for not being memory safe and for being easy to mess up and as a result accidentally cause security problems. At … Continue reading rust in curl…
109
On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
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Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Alpine makes Python Docker builds slower, and images larger
Alpine Linux is often recommended as a smaller, faster Docker base image. But if you’re using Python, it will slow down your build and make your image larger.
113
The Guy I Almost Was (1998)
An online graphic novel about a young man's coming of age in the California cyberculture of the early 1990s.
114
How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
115
Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
116
Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)
A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…
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Target didn’t figure out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did
And that one article that said they did was silly and bad
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
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Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?
Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter…