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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,895 posts.
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The mystery of the fifteen-millisecond breakpoint instruction
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
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W^X policy violation affects Windows drivers compiled in VS 2013 and previous
Back in June, I was doing some analysis on a Windows driver and discovered that the INIT section had the read, write, and executable characteristics flags set. Windows executables (drivers included…
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Call Me Maybe: MariaDB Galera Cluster
Previously, on Jepsen, we saw Chronos fail to run jobs after a network partition . In this post, we’ll see MariaDB Galera Cluster allow transactions to read partially committed state.
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Monads in Scheme
An example of a monadic programming in Scheme that juxtaposes Haskell code for a state monad with the corresponding Scheme code.
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Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
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How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
NOTE: This post was originally written after JetBrains announced a controversial new licensing model. Many people spoke out about it. The ...
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Tarsnap email confirmation bypass
One consequence of these unsolicited security scans is that — since they feed a variety of inputs to forms, including the account creation form — I see a lot of obviously fake signup attempts (alas, none yet from the world's most obviously fake domain name ). These are harmless, since the signup code sends out a…
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Happy Birthday Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming
Deep learning, despite its remarkable successes, is a young field. While models called artificial neural networks have been studied for decades, much of that work seems only tenuously connected to modern results.
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K&R C (2014)
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
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Fifty
So, it has finally happened. I just turned 50 and I can’t say it was something I was looking forward to. First the good news: today seems to be a day like any other so if you’re younger than I am, from the far side of the great divide, I’m happy to inform you that there is nothing that feels abruptly different. The…
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Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang
A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen.
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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Safe from what?
What does it mean for a baby monitor to be safe? Some things are clearly essential: It should not explode; it should not release significant quantities of dangerous gasses; if it's designed to be placed within reach of a baby, it should not pose an electrocution or choking hazard. Less obviously, if it has data or…
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Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness
Bối cảnh cá cược thể thao của Việt Nam đang chứng kiến sự tăng trưởng đáng kể, được thúc đẩy bởi sự phổ biến ngày càng tăng của trò chơi. Khi ngày càng
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The origins of chroot()
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…
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Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the…
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Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
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Best practices for a new Go developer
This year I had the privilege to organize GopherConIndia 2015 and also interview a number of Gophers.
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Categories for Programmers: The Yoneda Lemma
This is part 15 of Categories for Programmers. Previously: Representable Functors. See the Table of Contents. Most constructions in category theory are generalizations of results from other more sp…
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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
A trip deep into a retrocomputing jungle.
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Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
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Migrating bajillions of database records at Stripe
There are roughly ten thousand bajillion (to the nearest bajillion) merchants registered with Stripe. We recently finished a Very Big Migration of Large Amounts Of Data between several database tables for every single one of them, without losing any of it, without any downtime, mis-reads or mis-writes, whilst running…