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Writ – Opinionated, classless styles for semantic HTML
HTML is super easy to write. Markdown is even easier to write and generate HTML from. But what does it look like?
SIMD in Rust
An overview of my work on improving SIMD in Rust.
Creating a Pluto flyby using unaligned New Horizons images
Last month, a few days before NASA’s New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, I posted a GIF of it doing so to Reddit .
Indices Point Between Elements
If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a diagram of an array, the array indices, and the array elements, odds are good you’d produce a diagram something like this: In this post, I want to persuade you to replace that image, or, at least, to augment it with an…
Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me
I found myself in somewhat of a unique position last week: I’d made the Ashley Madison data searchable for verified subscribers of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and now – perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect – I was being inundated with email. I mean hundreds of emails every day
The Power of Power Cycling
Topics of interest for James
Backdooring JavaScript using minifier bugs
In addition to unforgettable life experiences and personal growth, one thing I got out of DEF CON 23 was a copy of POC||GTFO 0x08 from Travis Goodspeed. The coolest article I’ve read so far in it is “Deniable Backdoors Using Compiler Bugs,” in which the authors abused a pre-existing bug in CLANG to create a backdoored…
A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
Lisp for the Web, Part III
This piece is about how to build a modern web application with Common Lisp in the backend, from scratch.
Don't be a UN intern
This text is aimed at you, young student or recent graduate, inspired by the world of international affairs and humanitarian work, thinking of seeking an internship with the United Nations in Genev…
There Is No Thread
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
Tarsnap exploit bounty
Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…
An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
Writing a Game Boy Advance Game
I spent a lot of time as a kid playing (generally, pretty terrible) games on my Game Boy. Having never written code for anything other than 'regular' general purpose computers before, I've been wondering recently: how easy is it to write a Game Boy (Advance) game?
Debugging Lisp, Part 5
This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation, inspection, class redefinition, and restarts. One somewhat obscure tool for debugging is SBCLs trace. SBCLs trace goes…
The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
Analysis of PS4's security and the state of hacking
Since there haven't been any major public announcements regarding PS4 hacking for a long time now, I wanted to explain a bit about how far PS4 hacking has come, and what is preventing further progression.
Go, D, Erlang and C in real life: MQTT broker implementation shootout (2013)
At work we recently started using the MQTT protocol, which uses a publish / subscribe model. It’s simple in the good way and well thought out. We went with an open source implementation named…
Lessons Learned from Reading Post Mortems
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…