511
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
512
Switching from Common Lisp to Julia
I have written this post for developers in the Common Lisp community who asked why I am switching to Julia. It may only be relevant for the small set of people who use Common Lisp for scientific computing.
513
Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
“I don’t know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” – Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, circa 1982 Fortran is rarely used today in industry — one ranking ranks it behind 29 other languages. However, Fortran is still a dominant language for the large scale…
514
Unbalanced reads from SSDs in software RAID mirrors in Linux
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
515
US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data
https://bit.ly/crazymobiledemo
516
Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
517
My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
518
How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every…
519
Cognitive Biases in Programming
As developers, we’re familiar with the various problems that interfere with our productivity. But often we overlook the broad picture. Some…
520
Traceroute Lies: A Typical Misinterpretation Of Output
Traceroute can points to a link having terrible latency, but despite what it appears, it's easy to misread the output and jump to the wrong conclusion.
521
The impossible dream of USB-C
I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.
522
The software engineering notebook
Fellow software engineers/hackers/devs/code gardeners, do you keep a notebook (digital or plain dead-tree version) to record things you learn?
523
Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
524
Some Insights from a Julia Developer
In this post I would like to reflect a bit on the Julia programming language. These are my personal views and I have had more than a year developing a lot of packages for the Julia programming language. After roaming around many different languages including R, MATLAB, C, and Python; Julia is finally a language I am…
525
Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem
What do you do when you cannot copy text between computers due to lack of internet connectivity? I built a modem using the Web Audio API, allowing data transfer via audio.
526
527
The scale of tech winners
We all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech companies today are much bigger than the big tech companies of the past. It’s useful, though, to pu
528
Questions to ask in interviews
As my RC batch draws to a close, I’m interviewing once again. In the vein of Julia Evans’ great blog post, “Questions I’m asking in interviews” , here’s a set of questions to ask your recruiter, interviewers, and/or prospective manager.
529
Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service
SMS Privacy is available as a Tor hidden service, and it turns out ~10% of users actually use it that way. This post details what I found when somebody created a phishing site of my Tor hidden service.
530
ProseMirror 1.0
Two years ago, I started the ProseMirror project because I wanted to take a stab at a better approach to WYSIWYG-style editing. Today, I'm releasing version 1.0 of the library . The architecture and scope of the project have changed quite a bit during its lifetime, but I feel that the original goal has been met.
531
532
Analysing C# code on GitHub with BigQuery
Just over a year ago Google made all the open source code on GitHub available for querying within BigQuery and as if that wasn’t enough you can run a terabyte of queries each month for free!
533
What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in analysing and reporting on the massive VTech hack [https://www.troyhunt.com/when-children-are-breached-inside/], the one where millions of records were exposed including kids' names, genders, ages, photos and the relationship to parents' records which included their
534
Dear Postgres
Dear Postgres, I’ve always felt an affinity for you in my 9 years of working with you. I know others have known you longer, but that doesn’t mean they love you more. Years ago when others complained about your rigidness or that you weren’t as accommodating as others I found solace in your steadfast values: Don’t lose…
535
Peer-to-peer social networking with Rotonde and Beaker
A short introduction to p2p social networking with Rotonde & Beaker Browser.
536
537
Exploding Git Repositories
The git bomb. Crafting compact repos that can't be cloned.
538
Reverse Engineering an Eclipse Plugin
Introduction Firstly I want to note I’m not a security researcher, ethical hacker or at all competent at reverse engineering. I’m currently working as a Java developer but I’ve al…
539
540
RIP the Broccoli Tree
For the past few years, Patrik Svedberg has been taking photos of a beautiful Swedish tree he dubbed The Broccoli Tree. In a short time, the tree gained a healt