841
The White Gold of Turda, Romania
Though today we take salt for granted, it was once as valuable as gold, and the Salina Turda Salt Mine in Romania was an important source for eastern Europe
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
842
NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty
Announcing a $12,288 bounty (tripled to charity) for cracking the five seeds selected by the NSA in the '90s for the NIST elliptic curve standard.
843
ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment
Between the Material You design and move to break apart the Chrome browser from ChromeOS, now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment.
844
Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
I’d read a few times that bringing the temperature of a failing drive down will increase its reliability long enough to salvage important files. When the drive in my trusty Powerbook decided one day last week to stop booting and make horrible clicking sounds, I decided to test the theory.
845
Where does my computer get the time from?
This week I was in Rotterdam for a RIPE meeting . On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.
846
An alternative front end for Haskell?
λm.me - An alternative frontend for Haskell?
847
How I stay motivated as a solo creator
Working solo has its difficulties. For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind. This is...
848
Python 3.12.0 from a supply chain security perspective
This critical role would not be possible without funding from the OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Project. Massive thank-you to Alpha-Omega for investing in the security of the Python ecosystem! Python ...
849
LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
850
Divan: Fast and Simple Benchmarking for Rust
Nikolai Vazquez is a software engineer, designer, and musician.
851
Eliminating radio interference from Apple charger
Apple's product design teams should do a better job eliminating unwanted radio frequency emissions from their product!
852
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
Breaking through the illusion of convenience that's used to sell us automation
853
An interactive intro to CRDTs
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
854
The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
"We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it." The FTC and states are going after Amazon, largely for stopping merchants from offering discounts elsewhere.
855
Extracting Hacker News book recommendations with the ChatGPT API
2023-10-12: I have written a followup with some details about the process used to generate this list: Extracting HN Book Recommendations with the ChatGPT API, Vol. II
856
Career Advice (2013)
To my great surprise, young people now somewhat frequently contact me in order to solicit career advice.They are usually in college or highschool, and want to know what the best next steps are for a career in security or software development.This is, honestly, a really complicated question, mostl...
857
BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon
So numerous brands are giving up on Threads by Instagram, allegedly due to lack of engagement (ironically, most of them are still using...
858
Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)
Homemade clone of the Dick Smith Wizzard/VTech CreatiVision game console.
859
Passive Solar Water Desalination
I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth
860
Michael F. Flynn has died
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
861
Lumber prices down 11% YoY
Here is another monthly update on lumber prices. SPECIAL NOTE: The CME group discontinued the Random Length Lumber Futures contract on May...
862
Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level
[Sidney Harris cartoon used with permission. Copyright holder: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com .]
863
Working on Multiple Web Projects with Docker Compose and Traefik
Docker Compose is a brilliant tool for bringing up local development environments for web projects. But working with multiple projects can be a pain due to clashes. For example, all projects want to listen to port 80 (or perhaps one of the super common higher ones like 8000 etc.). This forces developers to only bring…
864
Honey, I shrunk the NPM package
Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of an npm package? At its heart, it’s nothing more than a gzipped tarball. Working in software development, source code and binary artifacts are nearly always shipped as .tar.gz or .tgz files. And gzip compression is supported by every HTTP server and web browser…
865
Building personal and organizational prestige
Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally…
866
Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude
At long last, a real-world use case for AI!
867
root with a single command: sudo logrotate
Starting from the constraint that only sudo logrotate * may be run, and ending at root: abusing the log file flag to overwrite root owned scripts and ride cron to privilege escalation.
868
Hey, computer, make me a font
This is a story of my journey learning to build generative ML models from scratch and teaching a computer to create fonts in the process.
869
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
870
Ági Szabados Does Not Need to Apologize to Me
So, at the opening ceremonies of the Budapest International Book Festival this year, a couple of people gave prefatory remarks before I received the Budapest Grand Prize and participated in my own …