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The meeting that showed me the truth about VCs
I had a meeting with a well-known startup investor yesterday. The talk somehow pivoted from my seed-seeking startup into talking about the…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
902
Frequent Password Changes Is a Bad Security Idea
I’ve been saying for years that it’s bad security advice, that it encourages poor passwords. Lorrie Cranor, now the FTC’s chief technologist, agrees: By studying the data, the researchers identified common techniques account holders used when they were required to change passwords. A password like “tarheels#1”, for…
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The 39th Root of 92
My new office space suffers from a shortage of photons, so I’ve been wiring up light fixtures. As I was snaking 14-gauge cable through the ceiling cavity, I began to wonder: Why is it called 14-gauge? I know that the gauge specifies the size of the copper conductors, but how exactly? The number can’t be a simple…
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A x64 OS #1: UEFI
I briefly cover what it takes to start writing a kernel which bootstraps in UEFI, as opposed to BIOS.
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The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
906
PlayStation Vita Exploit Reverse Engineering Challenge
We released HENkaku a week ago and were blown away by the reception. There has been over 25k unique installs and every day new homebrew are being announced. This is all thanks to those who contributed to the SDK project back when Rejuvenate was announced. Without a working toolchain for developers and a couple of…
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Throughput vs. Latency and Lock-Free vs. Wait-Free
On the previous post we showed an excellent presentation by Cliff Click, and one of the things he mentions is that there is performance for ...
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Notes on concurrency bugs
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result …
910
Find a new city
There’s a very rom antic American story that I love, that lots of a rtists who are young and starting out love, too, and it goes like this: Move to the Big City with nothing, make friends, make art, struggle, but make it. That’s the kind of story told in Patti Smith’s wonderful memoir, Just Kids .
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Understanding gradient descent
Gradient descent is a standard tool for optimizing complex functions iteratively within a computer program. Its goal is: given some arbitrary function, find a minumum. For some small subset of functions - those that are convex - there's just a single minumum which also happens to be global. For most realistic…
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The truth about Lisp (2006)
In which the truth about lisp is revealed, and some alternatives are enumerated.
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Uber's Move Away from PostgreSQL
Last week, a blog post by an Uber engineer explained why Uber chose to move from PostgreSQL to MySQL . This article was widely reported and...
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The Human Cost of Tech Debt
Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Infragistics blog. Head over to their site and check out the original. While you’re there, have a look at the other blog authors and their product offering. If you’re not already familiar with the concept of technical debt, it’s worth becoming familiar with it. I…
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What Apple should tell you when you lose your iPhone
Two weeks ago, I was on holiday in Turin, Italy and made a boo boo. I forgot my phone in our rental car for a two hour visit to a local…
918
The first version of Voxel Quest (with source) has been released
It is the moment you have all been waiting for!...ish. I am sticking one toe in the water and putting out a very, very unpolished release of the very first version of the engine (the isometric...
919
Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
920
Hash Functions all the way down
Update! I tested more hash functions in a follow-up post. See More Hash Function Tests .
921
Appending to a file from multiple processes
Suppose you have multiple processes appending output to the same file without explicit synchronization. These processes might be working in parallel on different parts of the same problem, or these might be threads blocked individually reading different external inputs. There are two concerns that come into play:
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Why lack of confidence can make you a better programmer
What if you’re not a superstar programmer? What if other people work longer than you, or harder than you, or have built better projects than you? Can you succeed without self-confidence? I believe you can, and moreover I feel that lack of confidence can actually make you a better programmer.
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I Love Go; I Hate Go
I liked Go right away. It was close enough to C and Java to be instantly familiar, the examples and tutorials were straightforward, and I was quickly writing…
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Is There Any Room for the Not-Passionate Developer?
A reflection on the software industry, on the place it leaves for non-passionate programmers, and the consequences
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Reverse engineering and removing Pokémon GO’s certificate pinning
A deep dive into Pokémon GO’s certificate pinning.