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A few simple steps to vastly increase your privacy online
Switch up your browser and search engine, add some plugins to block surveillance, and get a little technical with DNS servers.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
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80% of the Web Powered by PHP (2017)
Today, PHP is used by more than 80% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Slack, Etsy, Cloudflare,
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The principle of charity: Criticize the best interpretation of an argument
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
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Exercises in Emulation: Xbox 360’s FMA Instruction
Years ago I worked in the Xbox 360 group at Microsoft. We were thinking about releasing a new console, and we thought it would be nice if that console could run the games of the previous console. E…
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Preload, prefetch and other link tags
There’re lots of ways to improve web performance (see Web Performance 101 for a full overview). One of those ways is to preload content you’ll need later in advance. Prefetch a CSS file, prerender a full page, or resolve a domain ahead of time – and you won’t have to wait for it when it’s actually needed! Sounds cool.
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ARM and Intel have different performance characteristics: a case study
In my previous post, I reviewed a new fast random number generator called wyhash. I commented that I expected it to do well on x64 processors (Intel and AMD), but not so well on ARM processors. Let us review again wyhash: uint64_t wyhash64_x; uint64_t wyhash64() { wyhash64_x += 0x60bee2bee120fc15; __uint128_t tmp; tmp…
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The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
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Rules for Autocomplete
Autocompleting text with known values seems like an easy problem to solve, but so so so many UIs get it wrong. I see this frequently enough that, rather than complain about them individually, I though I’d just write down the set of rules they often break.
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Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994)
Subject: mother of all grease fires Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 17:34:09 PDT From: Brian Reid [email address lost in the bog standard forwarding frenzy]
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How to take back control of /etc/resolv.conf on Linux (2018)
Take manual control of your Linux system’s DNS resolution and keep programs from interfering with and overwriting your resolv.conf file.
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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
I’m thinking about this now because Mozilla would like to diversify its revenue in the next few years, and one constraint we have is that everything we do is open source.
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Lisp Macros, Delayed Evaluation and the Evolution of Smalltalk
At a recent Clojure Berlin Meetup , Veit Heller gave an interesting talk on Macros in Clojure. The meetup was very enjoyable, and the talk...
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Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019
Cloud-Native Full-Stack Software Engineer and Solutions Architect
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Quantum Computing for the Curious
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
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Backpropogation Is Just Steepest Descent with Automatic Differentiation (2013)
Preface The intended audience of this article is someone who knows something about Machine Learning and Artifical Neural Networks (ANNs) in particular and who recalls that fitting an ANN required a…
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Ketamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
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Programmer Migration Patterns
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...
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Introduction to Datalog
In contrast to the imperative programming paradigm, declarative programming expresses the logic of a computation without explicitly specifying its control flow. That is, declarative programming focuses on the what , not the how . If you have tentatively researched declarative programming before, you have likely read…
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The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce
AWS EC2 Secret sauce. How AWS provisions Windows EC2 in the cloud. Instance Pool.
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What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
David shares how the new age of information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. Read here.
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How to build a distributed throttling system with Nginx, Lua, and Redis
At the last Globo.com’s hackathon, Lucas Costa and I built a simple Lua library to provide a distributed rate measurement system that depends on Redis and run embedded in Nginx but before we …
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Thinkpad X210
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
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A Short Intro to Constraints
The essence of constraint is projection.
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iPad Pro as Development Machine
I purchased an iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil to use as my main computer. Can it replace my local workstation? Is it powerful enough for my day-to-day tasks? Let's find out.
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