2521
State Considered Harmful – A Proposal for a Stateless Laptop
Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of varioussecurity-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picturepainted in the paper...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
2522
Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points62 commentscited by 8History & Retro Computing details
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
2523
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
2524
Administrative Purgatory
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
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A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
2527
How the OCaml type checker works (2022)
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.
2528
The Illustrated GPT-2: Visualizing Transformer Language Models (2019)
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
2529
Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
2530
Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
2531
Using the HTML5 Fullscreen API for Phishing Attacks
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.
2532
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
2533
The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
Learn how to organize your digital life in seconds. Stop wasting time looking for information and gain greater focus on what matters most.
2534
Queues Don't Fix Overload
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
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Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
2537
Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
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The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)
There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…
2540
Pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS (2020)
This post describes the implementation and use of pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS.
2541
Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
2542
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
2543
Zerocoin: making Bitcoin anonymous
Wow, what the heck is going on with Bitcoin? When I started this post, the value of a single bitcoin had surged upwards of $250. It’s corrected a bit since then (down $100 or so), but it̵…
2544
Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
2545
MathBox 2: PowerPoint Must Die
PowerPoint must die.
2546
Archiving URLs
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.
2547
151-byte static Linux binary in Rust
Part of the sales pitch for Rust is that it's "as bare metal as C". 1 Rust can do anything C can do, run anywhere C can run, 2 with code...
2548
Typing Is Hard
Type checking is the process of taking a given program in some programming language and working out whether all variables and expressions have the correct types, i.e. strings are assigned to strings, arithmetic expressions involve only numbers, etc. Some languages also offer type inference , tasking the compiler with…
2549
The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
2550
Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
Musings of a Computer Scientist.