The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
I wrote a decade ago about the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich, a strategy for corporations to evade taxes that was widespread and large-scale enough to come to the attention of the International Monetary Fund. But due to various changes in national and international tax agreements, the strategy seems to have faded…
Distributed Tracing is scary and complicated... right?
Project website for WonderWorld
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
Using RAII to attach diagnostic information to your command buffers
This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun!
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
An investigation into how malicious nodes run by Chainalysis made their way into defaults of popular Monero wallets.
I've been using a Framework 13 laptop as my main/only computer for a little over 18 months now.
Wartime can be extremely demanding for Engineering Managers. But by ruthlessly focusing on delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining their own strength, an EM can lead their people to not just survive but thrive under pressure.
Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos (here’s a 2022 Rolling Stone profile if you’re unfamiliar), this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company …
What Is Declarative Programming Broadly speaking, there are two ways to program/instruct a computer to perform a task, they are imperative...
I discuss various models of biased bit sequences, and how to extract uniform random (or close to it) output bit sequences from them, illustrated with Python code.
Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing
By Devine Lu Linvega
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
Over the years, I've read a lot of books on software engineering. Agile books in particular like to refute the "Waterfall Model". Every t...
Bluenoroff or APT38, more commonly referred to as Lazarus Group is a threat group which has been tied to the North Korean government since as early as 2009 primarily being financially motivated utilizing malware custom built for each target.
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F'ing up the status quo and fixing education. Here's a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Now, here's a trickier one: how do you fix this mess…
Most speakers emit sound in all directions because they are relatively small compared to the wavelength. Audible sounds have wavelengths of up to several meters, so an acoustically "large" speaker might not even fit in your house.
