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”No one at Google is Returning Our Calls”
Back in June I wrote about the China branded OEMs as the last big ‘swing vote bloc’ in the handset market. These vendors which contribute so much to global handset volumes have not fully voted on w…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
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A useful Caps Lock key
Updated: This configuration no longer works in macOS Sierra or greater due to changes in Karabiner. I’ve written some new instructions.
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What are the 'real numbers', really?
The short, simple answer used in calculus courses is that a real number is a point on the number line . That's not the whole truth, but it is adequate for the needs of freshman calculus. The freshman calculus course (at most universities nowadays) follows the 17th century style of Newton and Leibniz, emphasizing…
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Don't Support Information Architects
Last week Information Architects (iA) released Writer Pro, a follow-up to the company’s popular text editor, iA Writer. By far, their most heavily touted new feature is Syntax Control. Oliver Reichenstein, iA’s director, promised in a blog post to vigorously protect this new feature: Syntax Control is a solid…
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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors
Within the constraints of the Emacs environment, there are no limits. Emacs is built upon this principle; the Lisp principle. Make some small kernel of features. A substrate. Take care to make this substrate programmable (in any language, Emacs chooses Lisp), and then build the system upon it. Let users worry about…
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The 7 Habits of Highly Overrated People
I remember having a discussion with a more tenured coworker, with the subject being the impending departure of another coworker. I said, “man, it’s going to be rough when he leaves, considering how much he’s done for us over the last several years.” The person I was talking to replied in a way that perplexed...
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Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
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How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)
I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls…
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Unprofessionalism
Being real brings the haters.
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Who's Selling Credit Cards From Target
The previous two posts on this blog have featured stories about banks buying back credit and debit card accounts stolen in the Target hack and that ended up for sale on rescator[dot]la , a popular underground store. Today’s post looks a bit closer at open-source information on a possible real-life identity for the…
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Clojure vs. Scala
Last week, someone posted a question on the Clojure group asking for a comparison between Clojure and Scala. Since my most popular blog pos...
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Writing a full-text search engine using Bloom filters
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
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Code != computer science
The Google informs me that Ryan Carson got his degree at Colorado State University.
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Geohot presents an evasi0n7 writeup
Hi, I'm on a plane from SFO to New York, and made something for you. Not even a rap song. ******* geohot( @tomcr00se ) presents an evasi0n7 writeup ******* == Intro == I was bored, reversed, wrote this write-up, and wanted to do something with it. I tried to sell it to the Chinese for $7 and a trip to the Pizza Hut…
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Blackmail fail
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
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Knossos: Redis and Linearizability
A few weeks ago I criticized a proposal by Antirez for a hypothetical linearizable system built on top of Redis WAIT and a strong coordinator. I showed that the coordinator he suggested was physically impossible to build, and that anybody who tried to actually implement that design would run into serious problems. I…
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Smartphone can use its microphone to extract RSA decryption key from laptop
This is neat: Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG’s current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of…
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