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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
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The Emacs Calculator (2009)
Did you know that Emacs comes with a calculator ? Woop-dee-doo! Call the presses! Wow, a whole calculator! Sounds a bit lame, right?
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WebAssembly Raytracer
While teaching a web development class, I wanted to present some benchmarks that show the performance benefits of asm.js as well as WebAssembly. I was unfortunately not able to find a suitable reference. Therefore, I implemented a simplistic raytracer in JavaScript as well as in C++ with a similar code structure while…
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Statistics, we have a problem
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
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REST is the new SOAP
A journey through a trendy hell
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As the U.S. Retreats, Canada Doubles Down on Net Neutrality
As the U.S. Federal Communications Commission prepares to rollback net neutrality protections, the Canadian government has used the controversy to double down on its support for net neutrality safeguards, linking it to democracy, equality, and freedom of expression. I've written several posts on how the U.S. decision…
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The Ethereum-blockchain size will not exceed 1TB anytime soon
Once a month users post a chart on `r/ethereum` predicting the blockchain size of Ethereum will soon exceed 1 TB. I want to clean up with some stories around the Ethereum-blockchain size in this article and try to explain why this chart is technically correct, but not the full picture...
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Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
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Ideology
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
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Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
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E Pur Si Muove
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
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Three-Valued Logic
Making decision despite missing SQL data (NULL): How to avoid OR…IS NULL in the WHERE clause.
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Using loaded dice to cheat at Settlers of Catan, and p-values to avoid suspicion
My copy of Settlers of Catan came with two normal wooden dice. To load these dice, I placed them in a small plate of water overnight, leaving the 6 side exposed.
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HTTPS on Your Landing Page Is Important
Occasionally, I feel like I'm just handing an organisation more shovels - "here, keep digging, I'm sure this'll work out just fine..." The latest such event was with NatWest [http://personal.natwest.com] (a bank in the UK), and it culminated with this tweet from them: > I'm
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How to break a Captcha system in 15 minutes with Machine Learning
Let’s hack the world’s most popular Wordpress CAPTCHA Plug-in
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An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...
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The End to Apple’s Cash Dilemma
With the U.S. Senate passing its tax bill earlier this month, the probability of a U.S. corporate tax overhaul has never been higher. While differences between the House and Senate tax bills still have to be reconciled in conference, the end to Apple's cash dilemma is in sight. Both bills move the U
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TP-Link firmware sends six DNS requests and one NTP query every 5 seconds
A design flaw in TP-Link Wi-Fi repeater firmware causes it to waste an excessive amount of bandwidth on NTP timekeeping. DDoS’ed public NTP servers in the process.
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The Amazon Machine
Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon.
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How to Read Mathematics
Ranked a top 100 research university, VCU is a place where discovery and creativity go hand in hand. Located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, its more than 200 programs emphasize hands-on learning, creativity and engaging in the world around us.
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High-Level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them
When Git first came onto the scene in the mid 2000's, I was initially skeptical because of its horrible user interface. But once I learned it, I appreciated its speed and features - especially the ease at which you could create feature branches, merge, and even create commits offline (which was a big deal in the era…
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Software compatibility and our own “User-Agent” problem
Sometimes you have to write code to do some ad-hoc things in order to make programs run in a variety of environments, but as time goes by, it could result in a tragicomical situation where ad-hoc features are built on other ad-hoc features. It is easy to identify that kind of problem, but in many cases, nobody can fix…
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An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
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