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Common shell script mistakes (2008)
Portability and Robustness issues commonly found in shell scripts
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
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Dropbox Smeared in Week of Megabreaches
Last week, LifeLock and several other identity theft protection firms erroneously alerted their customers to a breach at cloud storage giant Dropbox.com — an incident that reportedly exposed some 73 million usernames and passwords. The only problem with that notification was that Dropbox didn’t have a breach; the data…
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Becoming a Professor
Photo by Daderot [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons When I was first appointed as the director of the MIT Media...
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What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? (2008)
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Why is a Rust executable large?
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
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Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
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How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
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Open Source Speech Recognition
I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off…
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MitM Attack against KeePass 2’s Update Check
This post is about a Man in the Middle (MitM) vulnerability in KeePass 2’s automatic update check. KeePass – the free and open source password manager – uses, in all versions up to the current 2.33, unencrypted HTTP requests to check for new software versions. An attacker can abuse this automatic update check – if…
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Learn Docker by building a Microservice
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
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Combinatorial Music Theory (1991)
graph theory, music theory
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Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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HyperDev – Developer Playground for Full-Stack Web Apps
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well). Today we’re announcing the public beta of Hyper…
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A Facebook Sixth Sense
I use Facebook every day — probably too much for my own good — and I’ve always been tempted to dive into their internals. That is, the…
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You Can't Always Hash Pointers in C
Occasionally I’ve needed to key a hash table with C pointers. I don’t care about the contents of the object itself — especially if it might change — just its pointer identity. For example, suppose I’m using null-terminated strings as keys and I know these strings will always be interned in a common table. These…
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Want to spell check? Read the fine print
Update : This post has hit Hacker News - you might want to follow the comments over there.
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How to print things
Purpose Terminology Single-sided Standard double-sided Möbius double-sided Two-way double-sided Purpose The purpose of this page is to collect and summarize concise explanations of the pros and con…
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I Have Created 50 Games in 2014
I have created 50 mini browser games this year. This is it. Click the image to play the game. Games are roughly placed as follows.
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My Experience with Nix on OS X
Some time ago, I’ve moved this jekyll-based blog from GitHub Pages to a self-hosted NixOS server. A few weeks ago, I’ve also moved some parts of my local OS X environment from homebrew over to nix.
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Ideas for Game Clones to Code (2012)
So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…