The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
If you've ever thought of publishing a tech book then read up on my experiences writing HTTP/2 in Action for Manning.
Asynchronous programming in Rust continues to make exciting strides, including the upcoming stabilization of the futures API . But, while these core APIs make it possible to write async Rust code today, it's not easy: it's a far cry from the smoothness of synchronous code.
This article teaches the fundamentals of parser combinators to people who are already Rust programmers. It assumes no other knowledge, and will explain everything that isn't directly related to Rust, as well as a few of the more unexpected aspects of using Rust for this purpose. It will not teach you Rust if you don't…
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that
The execution of a program unfolds over some interval of time. The lifetime of every temporary resource (e.g., variable or object) is the time span between that resource’s “creation” and “destruction”. This lifetime is wholly contained within the typically-longer lifetime of the program.
Xubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” is just around the corner. It features numerous updates and an updated snapshot of Xfce 4.14 development.
This article was discussed on Hacker News, and was cited in The Mathematical Gazette. Introduction This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two…
I’m not a huge fan of stories about stories, or those that explore the ins and outs of reporting a breach. But occasionally I feel obligated to publish such accounts when companies respond to a breach report in such a way that it’s crystal clear they wouldn’t know what to do with a data breach if it bit them in the…
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
I’ve been helping a friend understand dynamic programming (DP for short), so I’ve been on the lookout for good resources. The topic is covered all across the web, but I found many of them focused on the code, and not enough on the beautiful visualizations that shed light into how DP works.
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
Jonathan Blow of “The Witness” fame likes to talk about just typing the obvious code first. Usually it will turnout to be fast enough. If it doesn’t, you c...
Let's Encrypt have announced that on July 8th, 2019 they will begin issuing new certificates from their own intermediate CA and not their current cross-signed intermediate. Here's what that means and what action, if any, site operators need to take…
You can use emoji (and other graphical unicode characters) in URLs. And wow is it great. But no one seems to do it. Why? Perhaps emoji are too exotic for normie web platforms to handle? Or maybe they are avoided for fear of angering the SEO gods?
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
For some time now, I've been reverse engineering the firmware of the Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet NIC chip, so that open source firmware can be produced for it. The BCM5719 is a PCIe chip which provides up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and is mainly intended for use in server applications. It can be used with the Linux…
New functionality in Wolfram Language 12 and Mathematica covers: ComplexPlot3D, computation with uncertainty, polygon operations, polyhedra, Euclidean geometry, AxiomaticTheory, NBodySimulation, machine learning superfunctions, neural nets, computing with images, SpeechRecognize, AudioIdentify, natural language…
This post will be different from the previous ones, since I’m going to present some of the early results of my work as a PhD student at the Prosecco team in ...
When all you have is a hammer, everything in the world starts to look like a nail. Twenty five years of doing analysis and helping others do analysis has shown me that there are at least three diff…
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com: Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. T…
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys’19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been…
Indian information technology (IT) outsourcing and consulting giant Wipro Ltd. [ NYSE:WIT ] is investigating reports that its own IT systems have been hacked and are being used to launch attacks against some of the company’s customers, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. Wipro has refused to respond to questions…
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
