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The Reliability Trap: The crash of Emirates flight 521 (2020)
On the 3rd of August 2016, an Emirates Boeing 777 landing in Dubai attempted a last second go-around after touching down too far along the…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation
TikTok has a reputation for its aggressive data collection. The platform has implemented various methods to make it difficult for reverse-engineers to understand exactly what data is being collected and how it is being used.
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OpenAI's Woke Catechism
How a Few Activists Made ChatGPT Deny Basic Science
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How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work
A couple of years after it happened I'm sharing this story about the intersection of an OS bug, a network hardware quirk, and a global pandemic. A chain…
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User Interface Design: Rules of Thumb
UI design patterns for web apps: 1) Use defaults; 2) Obvious settings; 3) Show progress; 4) Don’t interrupt; 5) Flat hierarchy
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Things CSS could still use heading into 2023
Just a couple of ideas! They came to me while I was poking around thinking of something to say for Alex Trost’s Holiday Mega-Stream (my segment starts here). Styleable Resizers Ya know how a …
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State of the Sanderson 2022
State of the Sanderson 2022 Introduction Wow. What a year. I can remember writing this essay last year, and being all giddy about the fact that I was hiding four secret novels from you all. I said, “Maybe next year, I’ll be able to explain to you all why my year was so strange.” One big part of it was those novels. The
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Money, money, money (and investing) (2015)
A comprehensive introduction to investing in stocks, mutual funds (managed and index), short-selling, and stock options.
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Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom
For decades, we've asked ourselves "Can it run Doom?". Now we can finally make the ultimate punchline: "Can Doom run it?"
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The simplest app that makes money
Start your indie sotware journey by creating the simplest app you can monetize
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Password Requirements: Myths and Madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
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Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it
Note 05/01/2025: Hello there, you can find an update version of this article here, with the latest findings, improvements and new tools. This is how a Docker container feels inside a macOS environment: lost at sea, far from the coast. With this article I will try to bring this poor container safely to the coast. TL;DR…
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Do simpler machine learning models exist and how can we find them?
The above is the title of a talk by computer scientist Cynthia Rudin. here’s the abstract:
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How Pitfall builds its world (2021)
Games for the Atari 2600 were quite constrained. When Warren Robinett first pitched the idea that would become Adventure , a game where you would explore a world with many rooms and pick up items to help you along the way, he was denied because it wasn't thought feasible. And it made sense to do so. This was the late…
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Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)
My personal website.
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Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
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Startup childhood – Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form
Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form
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For Want of a JOIN
Once upon a time, I was on a small team tasked with building a data pipeline. On this team was someone we’ll call Bob, who was fresh out of grad school and hadn’t had much experience with software engineering, and no experience with SQL. As part of this data pipeline, Bob had to combine the data from two tables. JOIN…
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How Apple names things
I love the way Apple names things: FireWire, App Nap, iPhone, iPod, EarPod, AirPod, AirPlay, FairPlay etc. It’s playful and there’s a lot of reuse of words and sounds. Having just finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I decided to visualize various Apple product and feature names as a network to see this reuse…
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The pocket guide to debugging
New zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging
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Avoid exception throwing in performance-sensitive code
There are various ways in software to handle error conditions. In C or Go, one returns error code. Other programming languages like C++ or Java prefer to throw exceptions. One benefit of using exceptions is that it keeps your code mostly clean since the error-handling code is often separate. It is debatable whether…
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Against All Applications
Imagining better ways of picking people
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How “See a Satellite Tonight” Works
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…
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Programming as Play
I often want to program something just for fun without any expectations. But why? Well, a recent scientific paper investigated this idea of programming as play.
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Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
During the pandemic, I deleted most of my social media accounts. While social networks started as a great way to stay in touch - the websites evolved into addic...
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We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)
The title of this post is a quote from Edward O. Wilson’s book ‘Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge’. For example, if you search for scientific papers about “Entropy” …
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Protocols, not platforms
Does everybody get to coin one maxim in their lives? If so, here’s mine: Everything gets worse. Let’s say you’re shopping at the grocery, when you notice a new food product. It competes directly with
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Binance caught commingling funds between US and international exchanges
Billions in customer funds transferred directly from Binance.US to offshore Binance exchange. Is this just a ploy to trick regulators?
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I still use Flash
How I Still Use Flash in 2022
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