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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,211 posts.
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It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do
This week brought another self-inflected wound for trust in journalism.
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Nakatomi Space
[Image: From Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe].While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of …
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Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting Jabber service
TL;DR: we have discovered XMPP (Jabber) instant messaging protocol encrypted TLS connection wiretapping (Man-in-the-Middle attack) of jabber.ru (aka xmpp.ru) service’s servers on Hetzner and Linode hosting providers in Germany. The attacker has issued several new TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt service which were…
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Using extra Firefox profiles to make my life better
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Does Go Have Subtyping?
I’ve been noodling on a static type system for my current hobby language. To try to keep the language as simple as possible, I’m trying to see if I can live without subtyping. Since most of my programming experience is in object-oriented languages, I’ve been learning more about languages that lack—or at least claim to…
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Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode?
A brief overview of our study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems.
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Please Pay for a Year of Nothing
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
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Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17
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Just paying Figma because nothing else works
My family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised to avoid spending money whenever possible. I was also taught “it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools”, which apparen...
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Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas
Meta's ad bots flagged Python and Pandas courses as live-animal sales, then auto-rejected the appeal. Why the 180-day data retention policy makes it permanent.
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The iOS option to charge battery to "80% Limit" shouldn't just be for iPhone 15
[There is very lively discussion on Reddit, where it’s trending at #1 both on r/ios and r/apple . There are a bunch of worthy suggestions there on how to improve the feature even more, but one thing’s clear: iPhone users would love to see this come to more devices.]
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The fake browser update scam gets a makeover
One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from…
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Higher quality random floats
Much has been written about how to generate random 64-bit integers; people might argue over which particular (CS)PRNG is best suited for a given task, but there is agreement on the general shape of the solution: keep some state around, and then extract 64 bits of randomness at a time, where each bit is equally likely…
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Fractional Factorial Experiment Design: There Are Too Many Experiments to Do
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a bunch of parameters to tune for a better result, but there were just too many to exhaustively search all possibilities? I recently saw a …
11992
Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard
The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows:68 °F above average is a …
11993
"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
11994
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Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme
Amir Golestan , the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo LLC , has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. Golestan’s sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol…
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Making CRDTs More Efficient
State-based CRDTs grow monotonically, but that doesn't mean they can't be efficient. We'll learn how to compress the pixel editor state by 98%.
11999
Circulant Matrices, Eigenvectors, and the FFT
The eigenvectors of a circulant matrix do not depend on the matrix itself, only on the size, and the eigenvectors are columns of the FFT matrix.
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Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017)
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.