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The origin of the law of torture: A cautionary tale
+ Ordeals and Plea Bargaining
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,210 posts.
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Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
It was a happy time for PC users. Microsoft had just delivered Windows 95, an incredibly vast improvement over windows 3.1 and DOS.
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What is the point of a public key fingerprint?
What is the point of a public key fingerprint? What does it do that the public key itself doesn't do. This post explains.
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Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...
11435
The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
Some might remember a book I released in 2016, “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”. A lot has changed in the world since then, and Shenzhen is no exception.
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The falling nutritional value of crops
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
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Moving from relational data to events
Knock knock? Who’s there? It’s me, Oskar, the end is near, did you know that? Ah, you know it but don’t know how to proceed? Let’s talk about the end of the CRUD world…
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Rising Temperatures in the Netherlands
Visualizing the weather anomalies in rainfall, sunshine and temperature in the Netherlands using data from the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI).
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Self-teaching, spaced repetition, and why books don't work
Listen now | "I was shocked with how intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was"
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Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
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Causal Trees
Projects and Ramblings
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Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book of commands handy.
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I bricked my Christmas lights
Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...
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Risk management is not project management
Why shifting full accountability for high-risk tasks to third parties increases rather than decreases project risk.
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Database Fundamentals
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower
11447
Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
Leaders are paid to think clearly. And a big impediment to clear thinking is what CBT/REBT calls Cognitive Distortions: errors in thinking or thinking traps we commonly fall for. Most high-performers are not pathological, but instead fall for them when upset or in high-stress situations. In this
11448
September 11th That You Have Never Seen
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
11449
Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
I’m a responsible web designer, and as such, since WordPress (finally) accepts media uploads of image/webp MIME type and since all web browsers newer than …
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Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad
If you have a QA team, please read this and give them a large raise.
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I Can't Sleep
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
11454
Embeddings, vectors, and arithmetic
An embedding is the representation of a piece of text like a word, sentence, or paragraph. Traditionally this value is in the form of a mathematical vector - a point in space. You can think of it as analogous to coordinates on a map that just happens to have many, many dimensions.
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The UX of delivering parcels
I shipped identical boxes, less than a mile, with multiple delivery companies — one was seized by the police. This is the UX of delivering parcels.
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Ruby's private keyword is weird
Ruby's `private` keyword means something different compared to basically all other object-oriented languages. Most other languages don't even have a feature matching what Ruby calls `private`, but incredibly, Scala does, which it calls `protected[this]` (meaning
11458
First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft has made tons of noise about their Microsoft 365 Copilot toolset. They’ve made a lot of promises about its capabilities to enhance individual and team productivity, but access to it…
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Canadian internet bill S-210 is a step closer to becoming law
After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking…
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The AI Trust Crisis
Dropbox added some new AI features. In the past couple of days these have attracted a firestorm of criticism. Benj Edwards rounds it up in Dropbox spooks users with new …