The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
Background Note: I’ve started writing this article about one year ago (September 2020), but I dropped it at some point. Its final version is way less ambitious than my original plans for it, mostly because I forgot some of things that were on mind back then. Still, better than nothing. A long time ago (in 2011) I…
Science, programming, books, and other interesting stuff
I have recently published a blog post that, as I had expected (actually, hoped for, as that would attract people to contribute to the “study”), generated quite some polemic on the Internet!
The mental minefield of capex and opex
Scan your iPhone for NSO Group's Pegasus malware using Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) by Amnesty International
The Algolia-powered Hacker News API returns nested comment threads that look like this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108
Selling your soul has never been easier. Today, there are plenty of demonology books that teach you how to bargain with Lucifer, written by authors who have probably done this themselves on multiple occasions.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Way back in 2013, I started mammoth.js , a library that converts Word documents into HTML. It's not a large project - roughly 3,000 lines - nor is it particularly exciting.
To my surprise, I recently found out about 2 new additions to the list of high-level commands: git restore and git switch
Poincaré began working on what is now considered to be the foundation of topology and algebraic topology in the 1890s with the work Analysis Situs (1895) and five later supplements (1899; 1900, 1902a, 1902b, 1904).
The supreme court’s refusal to hear Craig Murray’s appeal against his unprecedented conviction for ‘jigsaw identification’ means the British state is now effectively credentialising journalists. Only corporate journalists will be safe from state retribution.
Why hasn't new technology made us more productive than it has?
The untold story of the hole in Bitcoin's heart
Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement realtime collaborative editing (like Google Docs). They implemented lots of algorithms - CRDTs and OT algorithms and stuff. And they benchmarked them all to see how they perform. (Cool!!) Some algorithms worked reasonably…
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
With increasing IT volumes in the world, landscape change is getting harder and harder, and we need to adapt to that fact. Upper management is very slow to adapt and the Enterprise/IT Architect/Str…
I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a
Well I'm in the working world again. I've found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it's returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Beca...
Restaurant prices in the 19th century (followed by 20th, below) Note: Until the mid-19th century prices were often quoted in shillings and pence, or in Spanish dollars. One Spanish bit = 12½¢; One …
The time has come for me to find a new home for my (paper) cryptography library. It’s about 150 linear feet of books, conference proceedings, journals, and monographs—mostly from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My preference is that it goes to an educational institution, but will consider a corporate or personal home if…
When M1 Macs were launched, a new GPU with iOS-like architecture started driving the external monitors. This meant that the old method for controlling monitors using DDC wouldn't work anymore. Apps like Lunar and MonitorControl had to find other ways to change the brightness of the monitors.
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
About four months ago, Cloudflare launched Browser Isolation during Security Week, without ensuring that the product is accessible to blind people using screen readers. Now, four months later, this problem is still not solved. Cloudflare’s neglect of accessibility in this product raises a new barrier to employment for…
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to…
