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Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
1742
Formal methods: Just good engineering practice?
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
1743
Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible
Can anyone solve 1000 Opus Magnum puzzles in 24 hours? What about with assistance from bots? Will the solutions be any good? Let's find out!
1744
Simple ways to find exposed sensitive information
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
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Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency.
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How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
Summer of Math Exposition 3 - How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
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The plan-execute pattern
A ubiquitous pattern you won’t find in your textbook.
1749
A Rant about Front-end Development
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views…
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A buffer overflow in the XNU kernel
XNU kernel buffer overflow, introduced in macOS 14.0 and fixed in macOS 14.5.
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Notes on Tajikistan
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
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Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre
The Atari 520ST was released in the US in July 1985, but because Atari did not provide magazines with pre-production models (like Commodore did with the Amiga), it took a while before magazine reviews appeared.
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Atkinson Dithering (2021)
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
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Reconstructing Public Keys from Signatures
One weird hobby of mine is reasonable properties of cryptographic schemes that nobody promised they do or don’t have. Whether that’s invisible salamanders or binding through shared secr…
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NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use
Coming back to JavaScript and TypeScript after a few years neck deep in Python and Hack, I kept hitting a number of new, cryptic errors when running NodeJS code in my dev environment:
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Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987
In a previous article I've done the 'Hello, world!' of GUIs in assembly: A black window with a white text, using X11 without any libraries, just talking directly over a socket.
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Curl is inside 22,734 Steam games
About a year ago I blogged about games that use curl. In that post I listed a bunch of well-known titles I knew use curl and there was a list of 136 additional games giving credit to curl. Kind of amazing that over one hundred games decided to use curl! At the time, lots of … Continue reading Inside 22,734 Steam games…
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Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
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Lessons Learned from Scaling to Multi-Terabyte Datasets
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of the…
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Now is a good time to start a service business
Now is a good time to start a service business. Maybe you should try it! A service business is one where your company sells its work output directly instead of selling a product. Dentists, plumbers, design agencies, pool cleaner, consultants: these are all service businesses. The opposite of a service business is a…
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Nobody knows what's going on
A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial ind...
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1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
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The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
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Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they
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Software design gets worse before it gets better
The price of improving structure
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Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
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The hacking of culture and the creation of socio-technical debt
Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups…