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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround
Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?
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A seamstress who solved the ancient mystery of the Argonaut
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
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SQLite's Automatic Indexes
SQLite's optimizer creates indexes automatically to improve query performance with only nested loop joins.
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Algorithms to Live By – The Computer Science of Human Decisions
What does the math tell us about how many job applicants we should look at before hiring one? While onboarding our new employees, how can ideas from the TCP networking protocol help us to identify the optimal workload for them? Why would giving employees unlimited vacation days most likely lead to less vacation being…
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Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job
I got laid off from a software engineering job in April of 2020.
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26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
Since making a sudden leap from computer science to academic medicine about seven years ago, I haven’t programmed as much.
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Wiretapping Google smart speakers
I was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a "backdoor" account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the Internet, access its microphone…
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SQL + M4 = Composable SQL
I often work with clients who have large “data lakes” or big star schema style enterprise databases with fact and dimension tables as far as the eye can see. Invariably said clients end up with a substantial SQL codebase composed of hundreds of independent queries with lots of overlap between them. I want to be able…
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Ups and downs of a side project
Reflections from a 4-year side project journey.
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Why T-shaped people? (2018)
Read this story without a paywall
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Saying “sup” with `net send`
When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school network. AIM and similar services were blocked, but if we wanted to send messages to each other we could open up the Command Prompt and type something like: net send lab2126-24 test and get an…
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Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
About a year ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription. One of the few shows listed on the "plus" side when I made my decision was Stranger Things: an entertaining series with an excellent first and good second season. In short, I'm a fan of the show - though my appreciation of it doesn't come near my fanatical passion…
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Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
But there’s only one slot, you say? It’s all a matter of using a clever part to adapt a pass-through.
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Run Stable Diffusion natively on your Mac
Describe the image you want, and the app makes it for you.
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Ventura Issues
I’m more surprised by the nature of many of these issues, by how ridiculous they are compared with the sheer age and supposed maturity of a 20+ year-old operating system.
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Visually symmetric words
The word "kayak" is a palindrome, but it isn't visually symmetric. The word "bud" is visually symmetric, but not a palindrome.
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What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
The LastPass statement on their latest breach is full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. I’m providing the necessary context for some of their claims.
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A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
The terminal is the result of its history, from the telegram to our terminal emulators. What is the difference with a console? The shell?
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I'm done with Google
My auntie is in hospital for christmas this year. It's been identified as flu, but it seriously affected her because she has a lot of heath problems inclu...
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Extending Python with Rust
Sometimes a pure Python script can't just deliver the performance we need. When that's the case we have to resort to writing our logic in a "fast" compiled language like C or Rust and expose the function with through a Python module. This way we get the best of both worlds. Today I focus on how to use Rust for writing…
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Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'
The world's worst security flow
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Unbundling Tools for Thought
Disparate thoughts on personal information management after traversing the hype cycle.
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Digital Gardening in Obsidian
Observing growth in my notes without being overwhelmed.