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Google bug bounty for security exploit that influences search results
Short version: For the $12 cost of a domain, I was able to rank in Google search results against Amazon, Walmart etc. for high value money terms in the US. The…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 378 posts.
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Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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Probabilistic Filters By Example
Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…
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How generics were added to .NET
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!!
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Advice
Every now and again, someone emails me and asks for very general advice. ("How do I change the world?") With the caveat that I've only lived a fraction of one life, and am still trying to figure things out, here's the advice I'd give past me.
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Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
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Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
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A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64
Move over, Sennheiser. Make yourself scarce, Bose. Here comes the ultimate Hi-Fi solution for your living room: The Commodore 64! I s it sa...
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Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard
Before I start this post, let me preface it by saying that I’m not an experienced Rustacean by any means. The excellent foks at /r/rust gave a lot of helpful feedback and cleared up some misconceptions I had. Futher errata and corrections are appreciated. This post is aimed at helping other fledgling rust-learners…
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SQL as an API language
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
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John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
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Plotter Drawings: Five seconds of Donkey Kong
One of my hobbies is using a pen plotter to make computer-generated drawings. If you really like them, you can buy one!
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Apple now strives to design and build products that last as long as possible
I think Lisa Jackson’s presentation at the September 2018 iPhone launch event was perhaps the most interesting and most profound. Lisa Jackson is Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy…
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The secret life of NaN
The floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which is used to represent, well, values that aren’t numbers. Double precision ...
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CoreRT – A .NET Runtime for AOT
Firstly, what exactly is CoreRT? From its GitHub repo .. a .NET Core runtime optimized for AOT (ahead of time compilation) scenarios, with the accompanying .NET native compiler toolchain
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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
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How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (1999)
As a rule, "sophisticated" progrmming is pretty boring - optimizing the unnecessary to speed up the uninteresting. Here, however, is an incredibly sophisticated package intended for fun and games. The more you know about software, the more astounded you will become as you read this.
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Solving murder with Prolog
In our company we usually have a fun quiz every sunday and this was one of them
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Zombie Processes Are Eating Your Memory
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at t…
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What is Software Engineering?
Nearly all of Go’s distinctive design decisions were aimed at making software engineering simpler and easier. We’ve said this often. The canonical reference is Rob Pike’s 2012 article, “ Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering .” But what is software engineering?
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“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it
2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…
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The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
As a software engineer, changing jobs is a way of life. Every day, beautiful recruiters from top tech companies reach out to you on…