The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?
Like most electronic gadgets these days, ATM skimmers are getting smaller and thinner, with extended battery life. Here’s a look at several miniaturized fraud devices that were pulled from compromised cash machines at various ATMs in Europe so far this year.
Having just returned from the annual Oregon Programming Languages Summer School, at which I teach every year, I am once again very impressed with the impressive growth in the technical sophisticati…
An important question in code structure is whether to make classes work together through composition or inheritance. The "has a" relationshi...
By default, composing a new email in Gmail results in an HTML email under the hood — even if you don’t use any formatting. Luckily, it’s possible to opt-out of that and use plain text email instead. In the ‘new email’ window, click the downwards arrow and check ‘Plain text mode’.
I got started hacking on my own roguelike after spending several years avidly playing Angband . Like most projects, I had a few itches I wanted to scratch and it kind of took on a life of its own. One thing that annoyed me about Angband was how monsters dropped loot when they died.
I had the awesome opportunity of taking the EE423 Speaker Design class offered at USC while I was going to school there. The class is taught by engineers from JBL, with some help from people like Tom Holman (the TH in THX guy!), who happens to be a researcher at USC. I learned a lot about speaker design, and ended up…
A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote an implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in Clojure. The core algorithm came to twenty-five lines. I banged out the code as...
Back in the day there was talk about "jamming echelon" by adding keywords to email that the echelon system was supposedly looking for. We ca...
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
Disclaimer : Although I think DRM is both stupid and evil, I don't advocate pirating music. Therefore, this post will stop short of providi...
Today, July 4th, the anniversary of the day in which our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, is also the final day of a crowdfunding campaign to raise $12mm for a Super PAC to fund campaign finance reform. This campaign is called MayDay and the person behind it is Larry Lessig. The idea is […]
Since the introduction of Swift, speed has been a key selling point. Indeed, it's right in the name of the language. It's said to be faster than dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript, potentially faster than Objective-C, and even claimed to be faster than C for certain cases. But how exactly does it do it?
Leaving node.js land
CSS, a language for specifying visual appearance on the web, is … so complex that it has never been implemented correctly; yet, successive versions specify even more complexity. At the same time, it is so underpowered that many elementary graphic designs are impossible or prohibitively difficult, and…
I recently succumbed to the hype and downloaded Mailbox, a mobile email client that tries to help you manage your overflowing email inbox and achieve the mythical “inbox zero”. Mailbox does this by encouraging you to immediately archive, trash or schedule the email for a re-read or response using a swipe interface…
We all know that when designing and operating applications at scale, it is persistent state management that brings the most difficult challenges. Delivering state-free applications has always been (fairly) easy. But most interesting commercial and consumer applications need to manage persistent state. Advertising…
A friend was asking about the early Street View timeline, which prompted a trip down memory lane. It's been at least five years for most of...
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
Almost deported in First Class
Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures
Note: this is a post from 2011. It used to be on the IndexTank blog which no longer exists, so I’m putting it up here. —
