Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
This PEP specifies how Python software packages should specify what build dependencies they have in order to execute their chosen build system. As part of this specification, a new configuration file is introduced for software packages to use to specify...
I've written previously about the problem recursive descent parsers have with expressions, especially when the language has multiple levels of operator precedence.
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. WHO data shows that 9 out of 10 people breathe air containing high levels of pollutants. WHO is working with countries to monitor air pollution and improve air quality.
Do you have a wearable computer? Are you interested in alternate keyboard layouts but too lazy to learn Dvorak? Do you masturbate at your desk? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you ma…
One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive"…
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
The increasing polarised and politicised views 1 on whether to wear masks in public during the current COVID-19 crisis hides a bitter truth on the state of contemporary research and the value we pose on clinical evidence to guide our decisions.
Back in the early 1980s, Dr. David DeWitt – who you might know from past PASS Summit keynotes, formerly of Microsoft (LinkedIn) – was working on measuring database performance. His team wrote a benchmark, ran it against Oracle, and Oracle didn’t fare well in the results. Oracle reacted as one would expect – they were…
An in-depth, factual analysis of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. Discover the dangerous advice, factual errors, & misleading claims exposed by John T Reed.
Team82 researched the attack surface of the Danfoss AK-SM 800A refrigeration controller platform and identified multiple vulnerabilities affecting the embedded web management interface. Team82 disclosed the vulnerabilities to Danfoss, which addressed them in a new firmware version. Successful exploits of the…
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
Ponzi schemes fail because they are built on illusions: there is no there there. So what happens when an entire continent of towns and cities is caught up in a kind of Growth Ponzi Scheme? We are finding out.
SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper describing their results: collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash…
Nature Medicine paper revisited: And it is shocking
The original call to switch to the term `open source'.
iCloud Private Relay is an Apple service for browsing more privately and securely. Learn how to ensure the best user experience using iCloud Private Relay.
Animated sprite editor & pixel art tool
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
The numbers clearly show this is a pointless distraction for the climate movement
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be?
Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
Members of estranged parents’ forums often say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children did tell them why. But the reasons their children give—the infamous missing reasons—are missing.
Where does the money for public schools in California come from? What is the role of property taxes in education? When did income taxes become the biggest source of school funding? Does the lottery provide a lot of money for schools?
Yubico proposes a new WebAuthn extension to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to add a user-friendly solution for backup security keys, and receives cryptographic proof from researchers at the Surrey Center for Cyber Security.
