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The gift card accountability sink
The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
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A guide to local coding models
What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself
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More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
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I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
Microsoft has deprecated windows 10, yet million of users still use it. They say the hardware is not supported, yet they keep pestering us with endless pings.
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You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
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Personal Musings and Transcripts
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How GNU Guile is 10x better (2021)
In Rust at Facebook by Fitzhardinge of the Mercurial team , Jeremy says that a new language must be 10x better at something than one of the (other) incumbent languages.
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How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers
This article describes my nginx configuration and strategy on how to prevent web crawlers from putting down my instance while still serving most people with minimal amount of friction.
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Three ways to solve problems
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
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Coarse is better
Make AI weird again.
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Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
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Big GPUs don't need big PCs
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
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OpenSCAD is kinda neat
Earlier this year I designed a very basic box/organizer for AA and AAA batteries in Autodesk Fusion, making it parameterized so that by changing a few…
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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
In addition to the VGA donut , I submitted two other entries in the Tiny Tapeout 8 demo competition , where you submit a "tiny" ASIC design (room for about 4000 logic gates) that outputs 2-bit RGB to a VGA port and 1-bit audio to a speaker. One was a an old school C64/Amiga intro type of thing, and the other was a…
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…
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A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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The Polyglot NixOS
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go.
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Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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LLM Year in Review
2025 Year in Review of LLM paradigm changes
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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
This week's bankruptcy of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, is about more than a robot cleaner. It's about monopolies, Wall Street, and economists leading America on a path of destruction.
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TP-Link Tapo C200: Hardcoded Keys, Buffer Overflows and Privacy
Hi friends and welcome to the last post for this year! Whenever someone asks me how to get started with reverse engineering, I always give the same advice: buy…
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Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations
Timeline & Responsible Disclosure
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Prepare for That Stupid World
Prepare for That Stupid World par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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What makes you senior
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
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Believe the Checkbook
AI companies talk as if engineering is over. Their acquisitions say the opposite.