12061
SQL reserved words – An empirical list
These words cause problems as table or column name
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,211 posts.
12062
Bad Emacs defaults
I was working on a new installation where I didn’t have this in place yet and I kept trying to update a shell function, re-sourcing it but it never changed. Turns out it was loading from a backup~ of the same file.
12063
We’ll call it AI to sell it, machine learning to build it
An AI Public Service Announcement
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12065
How I Made a Heap Overflow in Curl
In association with the release of curl 8.4.0, we publish a security advisory and all the details for CVE-2023-38545. This problem is the worst security problem found in curl in a long time. We set it to severity HIGH. While the advisory contains all the necessary details. I figured I would use a few additional ……
12066
Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro
Free LUTs for iPhone 15 Pro Log Video
12067
Going faster by duplicating code
This function doesn't know the value being multiplied until it is called. The compiler (gcc, O2) emits a generic integer multiply instruction in its loop body.
12068
The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points.
12069
Building a collaborative pixel art editor with CRDTs
CRDTs sound cool, but how are they actually used? Let's learn by building a collaborative pixel art editor.
12070
A student asked how I keep us innovative – I don't
Last week, I did a Q&A session for a friend's security class. One of the students asked a question that I loved. They asked something like, "As a principal engineer, how do you make sure your company stays at the forefront of innovation?"
12071
FTX – The fraud was in the code
The jury got a taste of code review as they examined a falsified "insurance fund" and the infamous FTX → Alameda Research "backdoor".
12072
ECC RAM on AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs
Getting ECC memory working on desktop CPUs.
12073
The Future of CSS: Easy Light-Dark Mode Color Switching with Light-Dark()
A function that computes to the first color if the used color scheme is light or unknown, or to the second color if the used color scheme is dark.
12074
Why AutoGPT engineers ditched vector databases
AutoGPT decided to drop the support for vector databases: Pinecone, Milvus, Redis, Weaviate - all gone. What has happened to the original idea of efficiently storing agent's memories?
12075
LLMs can't self-correct in reasoning tasks, DeepMind study finds
A study by Google's DeepMind and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that self-correction in large language models (LLMs) isn't universally effective.
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12077
Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. In short the idea…
12078
789 KB Linux Without MMU on RISC-V
A guide on building a tiny Linux (only 789 KB) that requires no MMU and deploying it on a RISC-V system, with custom userspace code.
12079
Make your own pyramid salt crystals
This guide teaches you how to make pyramid salt crystals at home. Follow these simple steps to turn regular salt into premium artisan salt.
12080
Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
12081
Modeling CRDTs in Alloy – the importance of idempotence
Checking my assumptions about syncable data structures
12082
Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup
I gave in to my impulses and bought myself a small single board computer to be my power-efficient home server, here's how it went.
12083
UK Address Oddities (2018)
A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.
12084
Flexoki, an inky color scheme for prose and code
An inky color scheme for prose and code.
12085
Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
12086
My personal C coding style as of late 2023
This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant…
12087
MiniDisc Hacking
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
12088
Forty years of programming
I am about to turn forty-six. This means I have been programming for forty years, half of them professionally. During most of that time, I used a "standard" setup with 104 keyboard, a flat mouse, and a sitting desk.
12089
Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – The barrel file debacle
Many projects are littered with files that just re-export other files. These so called "barrel files" are one of the key reasons why JavaScript tooling is slow in bigger projects.
12090
Calling Rust from Python
I recently watched GOTO conferences' talk Calling Functions Across Languages by Richard Feldman. I’m afraid I have to disagree with using the term 'language' in this context. It’s a no-brainer to call Java from Kotlin or Scala or to call Java from Kotlin. Hence, in the rest, I’ll use 'stack'.