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Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code
Overview of search tools for desktop and mobile; using Emacs and Ripgrep as desktop search engine
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 904 posts.
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers
Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable...
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Zoom’s Use of Facebook’s SDK in iOS Client
Learn more about how to use each Zoom product to connect with coworkers, customers, businesses, and more with insights and best practices.
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GNU Recutils
Fred and George, Turtles in love There are hundreds of cool command line tools that have been made over the years built on the unix philosophy. Plain text is powerful, ubiquitous, and human-centric. It was also the only option for computing for quite a while. It’s no surprise that some of the most sophisticated tools…
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Writing Safe Shell Scripts (2019)
This page was migrated from the old website and has not been manually reviewed, or is here for historical purposes. We make no guarantees that the content is up-to-date or reflects SIPB's current views. Contact sipb-www@mit.edu if anything is broken or you have other questions or feedback.
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UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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eBay is port scanning visitors to their website
Websites are scanning for open ports on your PC to help fight fraud, but this data also flows into a massive, global tracking database.
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Rediscovering the Small Web
Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is…
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Translating Quake 3 into Rust
The Rust-loving team at Immunant has been hard at work on C2Rust, a migration framework that takes the drudgery out of migrating to Rust. Our goal is to make safety improvements to the translated Rust automatically where we can, and help the programmer do the same where we cannot. First, however, we have to build a…
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The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
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Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
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Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy . We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of…
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Mercurial’s journey to and reflections on Python 3
Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008.
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PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.
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Google Duo rolls out realtime AV1
A few new features to help you feel close to friends and family even when you’re apart.
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The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life
Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administ
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Over 400 vulnerabilities on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip
Over 400 vulnerabilities on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip threaten mobile phones’ usability worldwide With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an %
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ReMarkable MicroSD (2019)
This page discusses how I added a microSD card to my reMarkable tablet . I did this because I want to develop software for my rM without wearing out the internal eMMC. I chose an external card because I want to be able to swap them easily; it also makes backups faster.
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Turing-NLG: A 17B-parameter language model
This figure was adapted from a similar image published in DistilBERT. Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) is a 17 billion parameter language model by Microsoft that outperforms the state of the art on many downstream NLP tasks. We present a demo of the model, including its freeform generation, question…
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Cloudflare One
Today we’re announcing Cloudflare One. It provides secure, fast, reliable, cost-effective network services, integrated with leading identity management and endpoint security providers.
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To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
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Hypermodern Python
A guide to modern Python tooling with a focus on simplicity and minimalism.
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Assange Hearing Day 6
I went to the Old Bailey today expecting to be awed by the majesty of the law, and left revolted by the sordid administration of injustice. There is a romance which attaches to the Old Bailey. The name of course means fortified enclosure and it occupies a millennia old footprint on the edge of London’s […]
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Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by Aditya Mavlankar, Liwei Guo, Anush Moorthy and Anne Aaron