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How Big is Email?
Estimating the size of the world’s communications.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
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FFS SSL
wingolog: article: ffs ssl
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Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work
"In aerodynamics, theory is what makes the invisible plain. Trying to fly an airplane without theory is like getting into a fistfight with a poltergeist." --David Thornburg [1992].
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On Error Handling in Rust
My thoughts about error handling in APIs after writing a Redis library in Rust.
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How Unreliable is UDP?
Unlike TCP, UDP doesn't provide any delivery or ordering guarantees. Put into practice, just how bad, or good, is UDP?
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What’s New in Emacs 24.4
Discover what's new in Emacs 24.4 as I annotate most of the changes made to the new Emacs version.
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Holy War on Sites That Demand Pinboard Passwords
Over two years ago I introduced an API authentication method so people could authorize outside third-party websites to add things to their Pinboard account without sharing their Pinboard password.
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Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
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We need tool support for keyset pagination
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
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Why I Love Startup School
I realized on the way to Startup School that this was the tenth one I've emceed. We've done one every year since 2005 (plus two this year in NYC and London). It struck me throughout the day how...
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The problematic culture of “Worse is Better”
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…
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Losing 58.3 Lbs for Science
This morning was my final data collection for a randomized diet experiment I have been participating in for the last year. Here is a graph of my near-daily weigh-ins on Withings: ...
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Why threads can't fork
There is an interesting thread on the Go issue tracker about daemonizing processes. Most of the thread is not about daemonizing processes though, but more about why Go has no Fork() function which you can call directly in your code. The first time I read through it I was wondering and saying to myself: “Yeah, why is…
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Rolling Shutters
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
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Why your first Rust FizzBuzz implementation may not work
An exploration into some initially surprising but great parts of Rust (though you still may not like them).
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Making of “Introduction to A*”
(Warning: these notes are rough – the main page is here and these are some notes I wrote for a few colleagues and then I kept adding to it until it became a longer page)
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Fun with Shellshock
This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
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Building a F1 race simulator
One of the most fascinating aspects of modern Formula 1 is the use of computer simulations to predict car performances and race strategies. By the early 1990s, teams like Benetton had begun to deve…