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Learning from OpenBSD can make computers marginally less horrible

telegra.ph/why-openbsd-is-marginally-less-horrible-12-052019220 points127 commentsSystems & Performance details

The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…

Warrantless encryption is a first amendment issue

Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it

Twitter to decentralize something

Manton Reece2019173 points87 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

Experiments in Constraint-Based Graphic Design

Anish Athalye2019211 points51 commentscited by 6Design & UX details

Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.

Write a parser with JavaScript

Tan Li Hau2019114 points24 commentsSoftware Engineering details

Thinking in React Hooks

My Year in Review: 2019

Susan Fowler2019110 points34 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details

Here are some of the things I’m most proud of from 2019, and some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned.

Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors

Bruce Schneier2019201 points63 commentsSecurity & Privacy details

Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.” I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers…

Modern garbage collection: Part 2

Mike Hearn2019150 points91 commentscited by 5Software Engineering details

A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do

My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

mohddanish.me2019233 points89 commentsStartups details

This website is for sale! mohddanish.me is your first and best source for information about mohddanish. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!

The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

Krebs on Security2019129 points44 commentsSecurity & Privacy details

A top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to…

I stood up to my boss, then he got promoted

Ibrahim Diallo2019464 points217 commentsCareer & Management details

There is a special feeling I get on a Sunday evening. Sunday is the weekend and I am home relaxing with my family after a well deserved break. But Sunday evening is the end of the weekend, the end of

The next professional network will not look like LinkedIn

wfh.substack.com2019186 points112 commentsTech Industry & Business details

FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

And what that means for the rest of us.

Introduction to Web Development (2018)

A complete intro to web development for developers

ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop

Chris Fenton2019814 points149 commentsHardware & Electronics details

Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. The ZedRipper is my latest attempt to build a fun ‘project’ machine, with a couple of goals in mind:

A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

Things to Read to Become a Better Human and Developer

L-systems

Jordan Santell2019268 points43 commentsMath & Algorithms details

Jordan Santell, focusing on open web engineering, immersive web, WebXR, WebGL, JavaScript, open source, open standards, and all things weird web.

Away Fires CEO Steph Korey After Months-Long Search for Her Replacement

John Gruber2019199 points142 commentsTech Industry & Business details

So now the narrative is not “Away fires woman CEO and co-founder, replaces her with a man”. Instead, the narrative is “Away fires CEO who created ‘toxic culture’, brings in fresh leadership” — a narrative that wouldn’t be possible without The Verge’s story last Thursday.

Computational photography from selfies to black holes

vas3k2019204 points58 commentscited by 6Science & Space details

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The Nintendo Switch Switch

Cynthia's Blog2019329 points85 commentsHardware & Electronics details

Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…

Mind your Logs: How a build log from a Jenkins leaked everything

Aseem Shrey2019101 points23 commentsSecurity & Privacy details

Formatting Is Unreasonably Expensive for Embedded Rust

James Munns2019135 points30 commentsSystems & Performance details

As a (late) part of the #rust2020 request, I wanted to talk about one of the paper-cuts that has become decently problematic for new and experienced users of Embedded Rust: The size costs of formatting in Rust today are unreasonably expensive for users of Rust on bare metal embedded systems. In particular there are…

O(n^2), again, now in Windows Management Instrumentation

Bruce Dawson2019501 points224 commentscited by 6Systems & Performance details

I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…

Long Bets by Confidence Level

Jeff Kaufman2019102 points22 commentsTech Industry & Business details

If you want to make a long-term bet one of your options is to register your bet with the Long Now Foundation as a Long Bet. They have some rules, which are roughly: Both parties put up the same amount, at least $200/each. Long Bets effectively runs a donor-advised fund (DAF). When the bet concludes the winner chooses…

Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019

Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP2019121 points16 commentsMath & Algorithms details

We all lost a great person Cropped from Mexican NotiCyTI obit Héctor Garcia-Molina died just before Thanksgiving. He was a computer scientist and Professor in both the Departments of Computer Scien…

Developing a Statically Typed Programming Language (2017)

Minko Gechev2019143 points20 commentsProgramming Languages details

In this blog post we’ll go through a sample implementation of a type checker, interpreter and a transpiler for a basic purely functional programming language, which is based on the lambda calculus. We will do a “full-stack” programming language development by going through formal definition of the language’s syntax…

Why databases use ordered indexes but programming uses hash tables

Evan Jones2019429 points197 commentsDatabases & Data details

I think it is safe to state that hash tables (e.g. maps in Go, dicts in Python, HashMap in Java, etc.) are far more common than ordered data structures such as trees for in-memory data structures. One data point is that in a talk about C++ hash table optimization at Google ( available in Abseil ), the speaker noted…

Larry and Sergey: A Valediction

Nicholas Carr2019119 points113 commentsTech Industry & Business details

Photographer: “How ’bout we do the shoot in a hot tub?” Larry and Sergey: “Sure!” Never such innocence again. Can billionaires be tragic figures? Lear must have been w…