3481
Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server
Notes from a backend dev who builds and runs his own infra. Go, microservices, blockchain, self-hosting, homelab projects.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
3482
Why it's so hard to build a jet engine
Civilization's toughest technical challenges are those that require extraordinary (and constantly improving) performance to be delivered at a low cost.
3483
How to gain code execution on hundreds of millions of people and popular apps
how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps
3484
A Few of the Birds I Love
The barn swallow’s flight, the mocking bird’s song, the cardinal’s color, and the hummingbird’s character.
3485
3,200% CPU Utilization
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
3486
Another Conflict Between Privacy Laws and Age Authentication–Murphy v Confirm ID
This opinion is a routine ruling over TOS formation and whether disputes must go to arbitration. However, before I dig into that question, I need to note the case’s chilling implications. * * * This case involves the Adult Friend...
3487
AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data
Traffic trends from WebMD, Quora, Stack Overflow, Chegg, G2, CNET, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Substack!
3488
Write to Escape Your Default Setting
Writing serves as a foundation for clarity in thought. It can help you engage more deeply with your ideas.
3489
Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
3490
Turning my ESP32 into a DNS sinkhole to fight doomscrolling
A fun project that I learned a lot from.
3491
Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger
Pure scaling in shambles
3492
Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data
While looking through the articles on a "social engineering" themed forum I discovered a relatively new scam scheme that shocked me. People create thousands of GitHub repositories with all sorts of things - from Roblox and Fortnite mods to "cracked" FL Studio and Photoshop. As soon as you download and
3493
WASM Wayland Web (WWW)
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
3494
macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
3495
Goodbye K-9 Mail
Looking back on 15 years of working on K-9 Mail.
3496
Distributed systems programming has stalled
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
3497
Solitaire
I have cited a few games as inspiration for Balatro in the past, but I wanted to talk about one in particular that hasn’t been mentioned much that arguably is the most important. I think if I had some kind of Balatro vision board, solitaire (Klondike) would be right in the middle of it with a big r
3498
Mozilla's new terms of use are out of step with Firefox's direct competition
On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
3499
A data analysis of speeches at the Oscars
I analysed almost 2,000 Oscar speeches to discover if the claim that Harvey Weinstein was thanked more often than God is true. Plus, we'll find out which Hollywood icon is bigger than both of them.
3500
iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
3501
Cross Views
Your camera has the ability to take three dimensional photos. Your screen has the ability to display three dimensional photos. You’ve probably never used either.
3502
Photographs of the Old West
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
3503
Rediscovering Quaternions
How do we represent a rotation in 3 dimensions? This is a surprisingly deep question, and one we can learn a lot from. Our goal will be to “rediscover” quaternions from first principles, building them up by exploring different representations and fixing the failures along the way.
3504
3505
Bifurcation: The secret giant islands formed when rivers split
As I’m sure you’re aware, rivers usually combine together to make larger and larger rivers until they reach the sea.However, there are some exceptions: rivers do sometimes split up and flow in separate directions. These splits are called “bifurcations” (bi” meaning “two”, and “furcations” being the forks). They happen…
3506
Iterated Log Coding
I've created a new format for encoding real numbers on computers. I'm proud of it! Let's dive in.
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3508
I Went to SQL Injection Court
Chicago argued that answering a FOIA request with a database query means creating a new record. Matt Chapman sued, I wound up on the stand explaining SQL, and now there's a bill to fix it.
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3510
Hard problems that reduce to document ranking
There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day…