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100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls
A few thoughts on Rust after a few months of regular use.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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Linux v4.15: Performance Goodies
With the Meltdown and Spectre fiascos , performance isn't a very hot topic at the moment. In fact, with Linux v4.15 released, it is one ...
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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You probably don't want to run Firefox Nightly any more
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…
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The Declining Value of a CS Master's Degree (2013)
I don’t know if it helps, but Illinois CS distinguishes the two kinds of programs with two different degrees: MS in CS for the research program, and MCS for the coursework program. Most of the MS students receive funding andtuition waivers, while I’m not sure if the MCS students are even eligible for support.
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TCP Tracepoints have arrived in Linux
Linux TCP Tracepoints, and using them via bcc/eBPF.
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Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]
Recently, a Facebook dataset was released consisting of the complete set of users from the Facebook networks at 100 American institutions, and all of the in-network “friendship” links between those…
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Exploring Word2Vec
In my previous blog post, I explored some of the early ways of word embeddings and their shortcomings. The purpose of this post is to explo...
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From Rails to Clojure, Then to Java, Then Back to Rails
In the past 6 years I’ve worked on web applications in Rails, Clojure, Java and back to Rails. This is an overview of these past years, the benefits of working with such different tech stacks, and also it’s drawbacks.
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Why I Don't Sign Non-Competes
My first job out of University was in the IT department of a payment processing and debt collection company. My desk was juxtapose to a call center w...
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The Legitimisation of Have I Been Pwned
There's no way to sugar-coat this: Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) only exists due to a whole bunch of highly illegal activity that has harmed many individuals and organisations alike. That harm extends all the way from those in data breaches feeling a sense of
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User-defined Order in SQL
Some applications, such as todo lists, need to maintain a user-defined order of items. The challenge is that the order is arbitrary and can change when the user rearranges items:
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Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
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How Facebook’s Naive Optimism Built a Toolbox for Totalitarianism (2014)
Fractal GTM frameworks, big ideas, and narrative techniques
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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Twenty years, 1998 – 2018
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
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An employee whose job was to be sacked (2010)
Customer service has improved little in the last fourty years. This story demonstrates the high standards that once existed in one of our leading Department Stores.
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Message-Oriented Programming (2017)
Managing complexity within an application is one of the key challenges for any software developer. Cleanly reconciling new features with existing architectures is something we strive for.
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How to Use Go Interfaces
I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage. This…
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CSS: The bad bits and how to avoid them
The more I use CSS, the more I think it’s an absolute wild wild west. It’s mature, ubiquitous, yet lacks basic, common-sense features that come as a given in other similar tools
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Exercises in Programming Style
In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes. The book consists of a simple program implemented in 33 different programming styles…
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How I've built a profitable Slack bot as a side project in Rails
I've built a Slack anonymous messaging bot in Ruby on Rails and it is profitable. In this blog post I will describe what I did and tools I used to create, promote and monetize a simple SAAS product.
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TCP is an underspecified two-node consensus algorithm
I recently found myself dealing with TCP load balancing for a project and I've come to think that generic TCP proxies can't be implemented without substantial pain and how it makes TLS terminating proxies a bad idea.
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries: