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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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Book Review: Seeing Like A State
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
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Rejection Letter
I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more…
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to D3.js
The landscape for learning d3 is rich, vast and sometimes perilous. You may be intimidated by the long list of functions in d3’s API…
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Microsoft Issues WanaCrypt Patch for Windows 8, XP
Microsoft Corp. today took the unusual step of issuing security updates to address flaws in older, unsupported versions of Windows — including Windows XP and Windows 8 . The move is a bid to slow the spread of the WanaCrypt ransomware strain that infected tens of thousands of Windows computers virtually overnight this…
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Approximating sin(x) to 5 ULP with Chebyshev polynomials
Weblog/homepage for a developer/engineer/artist. DIY projects, opinions and code.
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Patching Is Hard
There are many news reports of a ransomware worm . Much of the National Health Service in the UK has been hit; so has FedEx . The patch for the flaw exploited by this malware has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t installed it. Naturally, this has prompted a lot of victim-blaming: they should have…
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VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
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How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
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Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization
Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization Zhang et al., ICLR’17 This paper has a wonderful combination of properties: the results are easy to understand, somewhat surpri…
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Programmers Should Automate More
Last week, I created a small script to aid my workflow which left me wondering why I didn't make it earlier. It adds an option in [Finder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder_\(software\))'s context menu to start a static web server in any folder which makes it easier to preview static websites. Technically, it's…
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Silicon Valley: A Reality Check
The nation has spoken: weird pointless $400 wi-fi enabled juicer company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley. So says the Washington Post: Juicero Shows What’s Wrong With Silicon …
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The Story of a Rust Bug
A while ago, I built a system-tray application in Rust to notify me of new e-mail called buzz. It was working fine, but every now and again, it would fail to connect to the mail server on boot if it started before my network connection was up. Sounds easy enough to fix, so I just added a loop around my connect (even…
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A plan for open source software maintainers
It seems to me that this is a case where problems are in fact solutions to other problems. To wit:
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Beware of Transparent Pixels
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay …
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The Many Layers of Packaging: Why PyPI Isn't an App Store
Thoughts on FOSS and fintech, layered by Mahmoud Hashemi
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Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
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The evolution of Unix architecture in two diagrams
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
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Lost Generation: The Relay Computers
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
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Making a Game in Rust
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
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