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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
DARPA’s 23 Challenge Questions
DARPA challenges The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has issued 23 mathematical challenges. DARPA says the solution of any one of these challenges would have the effect of “…
On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
I caught the chess bug as a college student, twenty-one years old, and it’s become my favorite way to unwind since then, as I’m now working at VisioStack and starting a master’s i…
Achieving 100Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server
Achieving 100 Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server, Zhao et al., OSDI’20 Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one …
The Largest Gypsy Ghetto in Europe – Stolipinovo, Bulgaria (2016)
Recently listed as the number one worse place on the planet to take a short vacation, Stolipinovo is a shocking parallel world that defies belief.
Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had
It’s easy to give useless advice that feels profound. For example, one of the pieces of advice I give most often to people is to write more. So a few months ago I suggested to a friend of mine that they should write about the situations in which they started procrastinating and explained that writing forces you to…
Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails
Serverless is like a black hole. It promised exciting adventures, but the gravity sucked me in and I spent most of my efforts dealing with its complexity, in...
I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
I took me 7 years to admit I'd made a mistake in choosing a Z-Wave Wireless Lighting System. Finally I've taken stock and replaced it!
Why I teach vim
The why of why people use vim has been covered fairly extensively, so I thought I would spend a little time explaining why I teach vim to my high school students, even in 2020. It all began when I …
An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look
Apple’s launch of macOS Big Sur was almost immediately followed by server issues which prevented users from running third-party apps on their computers. While a workaround was soon found by people on Twitter, others raised some privacy concerns related to that issue.
Application trust is hard, but Apple does it well
On November 12, 2020 Apple released macOS Big Sur. In the hours after the release went live, somewhere in Apple's infrastructure an OCSP esponder cried out in pain…
Intel's disruption is now complete
“Look, Clayton, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to read drivel from academics but someone you told me you had this theory… and I’m…
Why Military History?
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…
A visual comparison of macOS Catalina and Big Sur
Side-by-side screenshots of macOS Catalina and the Big Sur beta, covering Finder, Preferences, Control Center, Safari, Notes and more, with first impressions.
Using Matrix to replace proprietary and centralized chat apps
The website of Jae.
Don't use third party auth to sign in
If a website offers you to sign-in using Google (or any third-party service, say Facebook, Github, etc.), don’t use that feature.
PokéWalker hacking: A complete device takeover and ROM dump using infrared
Dmitry.GR: Complete device takeover by blinking at it!
Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and …
A Pretty Good Mathematical Model of Perfectionism
I struggle with perfectionism. Well, not so much “struggle with” — I’m f*cking great at it. It comes naturally. There are some upsides, but perfectionism is also associated …
Simulating RAM in Clojure
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
Hunting for Malicious Packages on PyPI
I installed every package on PyPI to look for malicious content. This is what I found.
SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
The unassailable advantage that big cloud providers like AWS and Azure have over the rest of the SaaS industry isn’t their quality or pace of innovation; it’s that they’re a single point of purchase for a variety of services. If there was a single vendor that large corporations could contract with and pay for SaaS…