5851
The death of partying in the USA
Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,199 posts.
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Would You Like an IDOR With That? Leaking 64m McDonald's Job Applications
When applying for a job at McDonald's, over 90% of franchises use "Olivia," an AI-powered chatbot. We discovered a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to access more than 64 million job applications. This data includes applicants' names, resumes, email addresses, phone numbers, and personality test results.
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Evolution Mail Users Easily Trackable
A dns-prefetch tag in an HTML email makes Evolution Mail do a DNS lookup on open, even with remote content blocked. The developers blame WebKitGTK.
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Configuring Split Horizon DNS with Pi-Hole and Tailscale
Post describing how I've configured pihole to return different results to clients on my tailnet than those on the LAN.
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Million Times Million
Is a million times a million a billion or is it a trillion ? For my entire childhood, it was a billion, only for me to grow up and realise, as an adult, that it had better be a trillion!
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Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success
Eleven init systems enter, one init system leaves.
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Parse, Don’t Validate – Some C Safety Tips
“A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.” – Doug Linder
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Is the doc bot docs, or not?
What are we even doing here??
5861
Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful
When talking about REST, it is worth reading the dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding. The original paper that describes RESTful web, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” Roy T. Fielding (2000), introduces the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style as a…
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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…
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Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
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The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
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Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE
tl;dr: On Unix-like platforms, if you use git clone --recursive on an untrusted repo, it could achieve remote code execution. Update to a fixed version of Git and other software that embeds Git (including GitHub Desktop).
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Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future
How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or di…
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Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left
In my previous post I showed how LLMs struggle with coding in q/kdb+; having immediate feedback loops using the q-MCP server does help a…
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SVGs that feel like GIFs
The moving image below is only 49Kb and has an incredibly high resolution. It's similar to a GIF but instead of showing moving images, it shows moving SVGs!
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Leveraging Elixir's hot code loading capabilities to modularize a monolithic app
How hot code loading solves client-specific engineering problems in my startup Alzo
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Running a Certificate Transparency log
Maybe you, yes you, should run a Certificate Transparency log. It’s cheaper, easier, and more important than ever.
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Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI
In my previous post Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin, I did some quick performance testing of CGI using a program written in Go. Go works excellently for CGI programs, for many of the same reasons it works so well for CLI programs and system daemons. But, out of curiosity, I decided to do a bit more…
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The era of exploration
This post explores the idea that the next breakthroughs in AI may hinge more on how we collect experience through exploration, and less on how many parameters and data points we have.
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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
At Soundslice, our sheet music scanner digitizes music from photographs, so you can listen, edit and practice. We continually improve the system, and I keep an eye on the error logs to see which images are getting poor results.
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I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links
Welp, Pocket shuts down tomorrow despite our pleas for it to stay. While migrating1 all of my saved articles, I noticed that I’ve got almost 900 saved articles spanning nearly 7 years. That’s a goldmine of stuff-I-like data! Some quick analysis using xsv2: 𝄢 unzip pocket.zip && xsv headers part_000000.csv 1 title 2…
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The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Management
The unspoken agreement that made Microsoft's lower pay tolerable has fundamentally broken.
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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels
We are products with labels