The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
by Miranda Reinert This was sent out as a part of today's Hell World newsletter. Find the rest here and please subscribe if you like what you read. The other teamToday’s main feature is Miranda Reinert writing about the sale of the beloved music site Bandcamp and the
Research published yesterday by several European media outlets has revealed that an international campaign in support of the EU's proposed child sexual abuse regulation has been largely orchestrated and financed by a network of organisations with links to the tech industry and security services. The
This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities…
Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian...
The ultimate type-level trickery
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
This week brought another self-inflected wound for trust in journalism.
[Image: From Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe].While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of …
TL;DR: we have discovered XMPP (Jabber) instant messaging protocol encrypted TLS connection wiretapping (Man-in-the-Middle attack) of jabber.ru (aka xmpp.ru) service’s servers on Hetzner and Linode hosting providers in Germany. The attacker has issued several new TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt service which were…
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…
I’ve been noodling on a static type system for my current hobby language. To try to keep the language as simple as possible, I’m trying to see if I can live without subtyping. Since most of my programming experience is in object-oriented languages, I’ve been learning more about languages that lack—or at least claim to…
A brief overview of our study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems.
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
My family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised to avoid spending money whenever possible. I was also taught “it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools”, which apparen...
Meta's ad bots flagged Python and Pandas courses as live-animal sales, then auto-rejected the appeal. Why the 180-day data retention policy makes it permanent.
[There is very lively discussion on Reddit, where it’s trending at #1 both on r/ios and r/apple . There are a bunch of worthy suggestions there on how to improve the feature even more, but one thing’s clear: iPhone users would love to see this come to more devices.]
One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from…
Much has been written about how to generate random 64-bit integers; people might argue over which particular (CS)PRNG is best suited for a given task, but there is agreement on the general shape of the solution: keep some state around, and then extract 64 bits of randomness at a time, where each bit is equally likely…
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a bunch of parameters to tune for a better result, but there were just too many to exhaustively search all possibilities? I recently saw a …
The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows:68 °F above average is a …
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
