The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos. A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google . The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I…
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…
I recently passed 100 days of practicing math every single day 💯 I’ve wanted to beef up my math chops for a while, but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment. Plus…
I had never been a fan of devops/server-admin work. The sheer number of headaches involved in setting up the services, configuring them, automating them, and ensuring their reliability were just annoying and time-consuming. PaaS offerings like Heroku, AWS—and later—Railway, and Render, were appealing options out of…
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
Self-hosting and paid subscriptions promise an escape from surveillance capitalism. What guarantees do they really offer, and at what cost?
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
I started using Apple computers — and writing code for them, starting with BASIC — 43 years ago, before the Macintosh, even, and I’ve made this my career. I’ve had all these decades to really, thoroughly delight in these incredible machines and software, and to give a little back with my own apps.
On October 20th, my seven year old son Nikolas suffered cardiac arrest while undergoing a procedure at the hospital to treat an underlying congenital condition. The doctors performed CPR and succeeded in reviving him but ultimately he suffered catastrophic brain damage. My wife and I were in the hospital for
Web Components are a set of browser APIs that allow us to create custom HTML elements. They are one of the major things that SPA (Single Page Application) frameworks have been giving us for a long time ... HTMX is highly interesting, useful and a promising technology. It simplifies many things and allows us to build…
No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it’s never a good idea to piss off the refs.
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
A vulnerable API on Toyota Tsusho Insurance Broker India’s premium calculator website exposed Microsoft corporate cloud credentials.
While reading Real-World Cryptography , I came across the "million message attack" . This is an attack that Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated in 1998, which effectively broke RSA with a particular encoding function called PKCS #1 . It was only mentioned briefly, so I dug in and decided to try to understand the…
I knew the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Statistical Association, and the National Academy of Sciences had problems. It turns out the American Sociological Association does some bad things too.
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
It feels like not a week goes by without someone sending me yet another credential stuffing list. It's usually something to the effect of "hey, have you seen the Spotify breach", to which I politely reply with a link to my old No, Spotify Wasn't Hacked blog post
If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
Selling my company was a milestone that many entrepreneurs dream of. But today, I get to look back on all of that nearly two years later with the benefit of hindsight.
I’ve had Feeling Hard Or Hardly Feeling saved to my hard drive since 7-17-2005 without even knowing who made it. Just now bothered to find out.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…
