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H.264 is Magic
A high level walkthrough of the basics of video compression techniques used in MPEG, AVC/H.264, codecs.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 466 posts.
182
The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
Back in the day when the British had a penchant for conquering the world, they ran into a little problem on the subcontinent; cobras. Turns out there were a hell of a lot of the buggers wandering around India and it also turned out that they were rather venomous which
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Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment
This is #3 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture.Previous post (#2): Stack Overflow: The Hardware - 2016 EditionWe’ve talked abou...
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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
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Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
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500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format
Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as…
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Unix as IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
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LL and LR in Context: Why Parsing Tools Are Hard (2013)
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
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Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
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The Democratization of Censorship
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
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How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
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What Is the Secure Enclave?
The big tech news this week is that the FBI is trying to force Apple to unlock a suspect's iPhone. One of the interesting points around this story is that the iPhone in question is an older one, an iPhone 5c. Newer phones have what Apple calls the Secure Enclave, which some say protects against requests of this…
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A Rebuttal for Python 3
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
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LL and LR Parsing Demystified (2013)
My first adventures in parsing theory came when I was doing anindependent study of programming languages in college. When I got tothe part about algorithms s...
198
What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? (2008)
Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS.
199
How undefined signed overflow enables optimizations in GCC
Signed integers are not allowed to overflow in C and C++, and this helps compilers generate better code. I was interested in how GCC is tak...
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Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new "USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be…
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DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
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Teaching C
I was hoping you would mention the dynamic checkers, ASAN etc. My fear is people will start using these but not understand how to really use them properly. Since they’re dynamic checkers you really need a good testing harness and test cases to go with it. The bugs ASAN/TSAN etc catch are usually strange boundary…
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The 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle
After reading about the Oracle v. Google trial I looked up the famous 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle, which implement the rangeCheck method for arrays. Note that arrays and…
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Firing People
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
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A practical introduction to functional programming (2013)
Many functional programming articles teach abstract functional techniques. That is, composition, pipelining, higher order functions. This one is different. I...
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10-Year Exercise Periods Make Sense
Scott Kupor at Andreessen Horowitz has a post today on some potential downsides of 10-year exercise periods for startup employees’ stock options. I’d recommend reading the whole thing for context here, but to summarize: * He argues that allowing employees who leave a company to keep their optio...