The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing …
One thing you may have noticed about the trigonometric functions sine and cosine is that they seem to have no agreed upon definition. Or rather, different authors choose different definitions as the starting point, mainly based on convenience. This isn’t problematic or even particularly unusual in mathematics: as long…
I was pacing around my apartment at 2 a.m., palms sweaty, convinced the production database had already gone up in flames. It hadn’t, of course, but my
This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like...
Proton email keeps sending my non-Proton email accounts encrypted emails. I figure out why and show you how to turn it off.
On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com , which until very…
In the past couple of years, I’ve been working in billing and payments at Justworks . This experience introduced me to the world of bookkeeping and accounting in ways I didn’t expect: I took a course and read a textbook in accounting, adopted plain text accounting for my personal finances, and worked in a double-entry…
The project has been haunted by a mysterious bug since sometime February. It relates to the code that constructs the index, particularly the code that merges partial indices. In short the search engine constucts the reverse index through successive merging of smaller indices, which reduces the overall memory…
Don't trust. Verify. I could not resist making a fake book cover Here follows a brief description on how you can detect if the curl package would ever make an xz. xz (and its library liblzma) was presumably selected as a target because it is an often used component and by extension via systemd it … Continue reading…
I’m a bit behind on my weeknotes, so there’s a lot to cover here. But first... a review of the last 24 hours of Large Language Model news. All times …
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
I've spent the past three years researching and writing a book about the history of psychological warfare in the United States. It’s called Stories Are...
Another of history's great killers is on the chopping block
my deployment platform is a shell script 2024-04-09 like many people, i fell in love with free software because i could install it. i'd come home from work and install a bunch of software. what fun! tee hee! a playground and i'm the prince! but eventually, relentlessly, it all starts to feel more like a horror show…
PowerPC Macs were produced in huge numbers, and a lot of this hardware is still viable for use today, with professional software such as Photoshop CS2 and Propellerheads Reason. They're still good workstations, with lots of productivity software, and no always-online tracking or distractions. Originally, I got mine…
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
Yesterday’s eclipse as seen by the GOES-East weather satellite. I just grabbed the full-disk geocolor JPGs with wget and stitched them together with ffmpeg. BTW, If you’re wondering why the clouds remain in view as night falls to the East, it’s because the geocolor image is a composite of “true color” daytime and a…
I do a lot of electronics projects in my spare time, and I tend to try to make reusable parts to save myself effort in the future. Because I have to order ingredients in certain quantities, I often wind up with more than I need for my project.
Lambda Screen allows you to draw images using terms of pure lambda calculus. By using fixed-point combinators, you can even create infinitely detailed fractals.
Those of you who haven’t been in IT for far, far too long might not know that next month will be the 16th(!) anniversary of the disclosure of what was, at the time, a fairly earth-shattering revelation: that for about 18 months, the Debian OpenSSL package was generating entirely predictable private keys .
SQLite is fast, really fast. On a single ~40€ / m commodity server, it can sustain ~168,000 reads and ~8000 writes per second, concurrently. Because it's an embedded library designed for client-side applications such as embedded systems and phone & desktop applications, SQLite databases have to be co-located…
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
