3511
How Equifax Became a Private IRS
At a Goldman Sachs conference in December, Equifax CEO Mark Begor told investors that his company has a monopoly in an obscure but important area - selling data about your salary to third parties.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
3512
The Disappearance of the Ashtray
These things used to be pieces of furniture
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3514
How we turned the tables to catch my sister’s Bumble stalker
My sister’s stalker, who had used Instagram and Bumble to work out where she lived and start stalking her in real life, was recently…
3515
A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is good, but not quite the best (2012)
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
3516
Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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3518
Wonders of Street View
Explore the weird and wonderful things on Google Street View
3519
Netflix's New Chapter
Netflix waited out Blockbuster with better economics, and it’s seeking to do the same with its competitors today; the key to the company’s differentiation, though, is increasingly creat…
3520
Windows 3.x VDDVGA
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…
3521
An intutive counterexample to the axiom of choice
Time for some hard-core geeking-out. This comment on HN by /u/jiggawatts struck me as a brilliant idea: it's an intuitive counter-example t...
3522
Git commands you probably do not need
Ah, git ! Love it, hate it. Few things are as central to the modern software development workflow as source-control management (SCM) tools. Although there have been and still are plenty of alternatives to git in the world of SCMs, none other seem quite as prevalent both in open-source and the enterprise.
3523
My Dream Computer
🥇 Thanks to maya.land and goofpunk for sponsoring the blog! If you'd like to learn how to support my writing and get a shoutout here every week, check the sp...
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Emulating win32
How retrowin32 works, at a high level.
3526
Guide to Software Architecture Documentation
This guide shows you how to write, structure, visualize and manage software architecture documentation in a lean way using appropriate documentation tools.
3527
The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
3528
TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
3529
Bypassing Gmail's spam filters with ChatGPT
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably already know what ChatGPT is. I am an operator of high bandwidth Tor exit relays, and with that, I get a lot of abuse complaints. Combined with the fact that I have ai lease on a “/24” of IPv4 space, basically a block of 256 IP addresses, I have the IP space’s…
3530
The contagious visual blandness of Netflix
And how to treat it
3531
How to implement Q&A against your docs with GPT3 embeddings and Datasette
If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text …
3532
ChatGPT in an iOS Shortcut: Smart HomeKit Voice Assistant
Ever since I tried ChatGPT and GPT-3, everything else feels painfully dumb and useless: Siri, Alexa, Google Home and all other “smart”…
3533
What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] At around 7PM on the balmy evening of Saturday, December 3, 2022 , nearly every electric customer in Moore County, North Carolina was simultaneously plunged into darkness. Amid the confusion, the power utility was quick to di
3534
ECC RAM should be a human right
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
3535
AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. Like a cruise ship hea…
3536
Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?
Can it be true that Apple is sent information about every image we browse in the Finder? Analysis of Visual Look Up and Live Text and when it happens.
3537
Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem
My response to the discussion topic posed in Python Packaging Strategy Discussion Part 1 had become quite long, so I decided to move it to write a blog post instead. This post then started absorbing various draft posts I’ve had on this topic since this blog was started, morphing to include my broader thoughts on where…
3538
What to do when you’ve ruined your life
Every now and then, life becomes unacceptable. What do you do then?
3539
Amazon Smile Gets a Frown
I’m pretty sure how the first meetings went almost a decade ago: “Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, i…
3540
An unexpected benefit of unit tests
While I won’t go so far as to diagnose myself with ADD without consulting a doctor, those who know me know I can be distracted quite easily. So recently, I decided to do something a little different with a personal project I started a few weeks ago (link to come). I wrote unit tests. That may seem rather uninspired…