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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
Let’s Run Lisp on a Microcontroller
I was inexplicably amazed by Lisp since the first day I've seen how Lisp programs look.
Analyzing the Patterns of Numbers in 10M Passwords (2015)
There are many patterns for numbers in passwords, which involve surprising yet intuitive logic.
Measuring how bad Twitter is
My last blog post (exposing Twitter's excessive costs) prompted horror story emails on Twitter. But the best thing sent to me was a finan...
Russian ship loitering near undersea cables
**Russian ship loitering near undersea cables** Updated: Original article 9th Oct. 2016. The Russian Navy’s Project 22010 mini-sub host ship Yantar is known for loitering near undersea internet cables (known as Submarine communications Cables - SCC). It may have other special missions also…. Read More >….
What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?
This blog post shows how to create a reliable and realistic-looking malicious USB key that can be used in a drop attack.
So You Want to Learn Physics
Over the past few years, ever since writing “If Susan Can Learn Physics So Can You,” I've been contacted by people from all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don't know where to start, what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies...this post is a condense
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 9: tracing a crash through software and hardware
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
Poll on macOS 10.12 is broken
When Mac OS X first launched they did so without an existing poll function. They later added poll() in Mac OS X 10.3, but we quickly discovered that it was broken (it returned a non-zero value when asked to wait for nothing) so in the curl project we added a check in configure for that … Continue reading poll on mac…
Data Mining Hacker News: Front vs. Back
Using Haskell, R, Python, SQLite, and Elasticsearch, we data mine Hacker News front page stories and their back page counterparts for patterns.
Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
Git-repo – Manage Gitlab, GitHub and Bitbucket from the command line
I got nothing to blog.
Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
In Search of Silence Joel Spolsky is a well-respected figure in Silicon Valley. He created the popular Trello project manager software and is currently the ... Read more
How I built a keyboard by hand
I had spare mechanical keyboard switches and keycaps from other keyboard projects, and I wanted to see if it would be feasible to build a keyboard using only hand tools.
The Hard Raise
In the summer of 2003, Brad Burnham and I set out to raise a $100mm early stage venture capital fund. We had both been successful VCs in other firms and we had a thesis that the second wave of the Internet was upon us and that large networks were going to get built in this […]
Developer hiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
EC2's most dangerous feature
A review for readers unfamiliar with this feature: Amazon IAM ( Identity and Access Management ) is a service which allows for the creation of access credentials which are limited in scope; for example, you can have keys which can read objects from Amazon S3 but cannot write any objects. IAM Roles for EC2 are a…
HTML Kong
There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .
Image unshredder by simulated annealing (2015)
On another page , I unleash the simulated annealing algorithm on a toy problem. It generates an image full of random colorful pixels, and rearranges the pixels so that similar colors are near each other.