The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,201 posts.
Late last year, security researchers made a startling discovery: Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were bypassing moderation on social media platforms by leveraging the same malicious advertising technology that powers a sprawling ecosystem of online hucksters and website hackers. A new report on the fallout…
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
Disclaimer: This story took place when I was a junior developer for a previous employer ages ago. Some details might be fuzzy, and goes without saying this is entirely from my own POV so take everything here with humor and a grain of salt.
Casey Handmer June 2025 Download a printable PDF. NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology devel…
For sure easier than solving it in SAT!
ASIF disk images are new in Tahoe, and promise to be space efficient, as they’re sparse files, and almost as fast as the disk they’re stored on. Ideal for VMs and general use.
A delve into CD ripping and metadata
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory
Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate on simple tasks? I finally cracked the code using thermal receipt printer and game design.
Current recommendations of agentic coding.
This is another post that started after several toots on mastodon. Most of the things presented here were already tooted by other people, but I think this is a good chance to write a mini tutorial about what to look at. We’ll use DNS, whois, BGP and your favourite search engine. What is DNS4EU? To quote the web page…
Part 7 of my software journey, getting to know developer experience.
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
What Dollywood says about the state of America's Transit
I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’m just over 46 years old. So how the hell did we get here?…
A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great …
TL;DR : GitHub Actions provides a policy mechanism for limiting the kinds of actions and reusable workflows that can be used within a repository, organization, or entire enterprise. Unfortunately, this mechanism is trivial to bypass . GitHub has told me that they don’t consider this a security issue (I disagree), so…
I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the…
8 years have passed since the the left-pad incident happened. It's been good for me to avoid this subject for focusing on actual work. Also, silence is gold. On the other hand, left-pad is seen as a notable event mentioned in books, so I'll share more info and thoughts about what exactly happened.
Why age is crucial in Korea, affecting language, respect, and social relationships. What is Korean & international age?
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People think they can use Fine-Tune for Knowledge Injection. People are Wrong
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ . I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources t...
Originally published May 20, 2015.
Discovering Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
You just can't finish off Zuckerberg.
