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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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Fridge 0.1
Imagine something really cool, like a fridge connected to a powerwall, powered entirely by solar panels. What could be cooler than that?
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Counting Bees on a Raspberry Pi with a ConvNet
the first thing i thought when we setup our bee hive was "i wonder how you could count the number of bees coming and going?"
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An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers. The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up. Both Shaun and I had long felt there was […]
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Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and…
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On Competing with C Using Haskell (2017)
Mark Karpov wrote in his article on Migrating text metrics to pure Haskell how he originally did foreign calls out to C for many of the functions in his text metric package, but now ported them to Haskell when he learned that Haskell can give you performance comparable to C.
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GDPR: Don't Panic
In another week the GDPR , or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
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Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site
LocationSmart , a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity…
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LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
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Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
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Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, E…
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Statistics, Fast and Slow
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has increased nearly tenfold since 1990. Si…
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Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
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Lightweight Concurrency in Lua
wingolog: article: lightweight concurrency in lua
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Apartment baiting with Facebook Ads
There are all sorts of clever things you can do with Facebook’s ad platform. One example I ran across recently is the ability to snipe a…
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Validating UTF-8 strings using as little as 0.7 cycles per byte
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
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JavaScript is Good, Actually
The subtext of many discussions around building software in Electron and React/Native involve this assumption that JavaScript is bad. There is a kind of unspoken understanding that JavaScript developers are stuck writing it, that either:
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Too Clever by Half
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
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Completely Silent Computer
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
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Part 1: Merging and patches
A recent paper suggested a new mathematical point of view on version control. I first found out about it from pijul, a new version control system (VCS) that ...
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Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all things Matrix
Matrix is a protocol for decentralised, federated and secure communications, created and maintained by New Vector, a company split between London, UK and Rennes, France. It's based on RESTful HTTP/JSON APIs, documented in open specifications, and is designed to be usable for anything that requires real-time-ish…
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Gödel and the unreality of time
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...