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The Making of Apple’s Emoji
When design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design, magic happens. This is the story of how an intern and her…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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Spectre and the end of langsec
wingolog: article: spectre and the end of langsec
2253
Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase
Coinbase and Overstock.com just fixed a serious glitch that allowed Overstock customers to buy any item at a tiny fraction of the listed price. Potentially more punishing, the flaw let anyone paying with bitcoin reap many times the authorized bitcoin refund amount on any canceled Overstock orders.
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A simple makefile is a unicorn
Whenever there is a discussion online about the tools to build software, there is always That One Person that shows up and claims that all b...
2255
Attack of the Week: Group Messaging in WhatsApp and Signal
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that secure messaging is one of my favorite topics. However, recently I’ve been a bit disappointed. My sadness comes from the fact that lately …
2256
What the Four Color Theorem Can Teach Us About Writing Software
A visual exploration of what The Four Color Theorem can say about software complexity.
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Writing a C Compiler, Part 5
This is the fifth post in a series. Read part 1 here.
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GPU Fluid
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
2260
The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
I guess we should also include a Planet Nine mission (once confirmed) among the possibilities opened up by this technology. In fact, since that planet seems to be near aphelion (otherwise we should have found it), it should also be beyond the gravitational focus of the Sun and thus any mission there could double as a…
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Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
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Xerox Alto's 3 Mb/s Ethernet: Building a Gateway with a BeagleBone
The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, the optic...
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how t…
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An array of eight SN76489 sound chips playable via USB MIDI
The SN76489 is the same sound chip as found in the SEGA Master System. This is an array of eight SN76489 sound chips playable via USB...
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Browserling goes viral with cheap phone users trying to use WhatsApp
The most random and amazing things happened at my company Browserling in the last few weeks. Someone in India discovered that they can use WhatsApp on very cheap $20 phones (Jio Phones) via Browserling. These cheap phones can't run WhatsApp but if you go to Browserling, you can use it via web.whatsapp.com. He made a...
2269
Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Scaling Message Delivery
In part two of this series we discussed data replication within the context of a distributed log and how it relates to high availability. Next, we’ll look at what it takes to scale the log such that it can handle non-trivial workloads. Data Scalability A key part of scaling any kind of data-intensive system is the…
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Beginner's guide to longevity research
A beginner's guide to longevity research
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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
2275
Go’s hidden pragmas
This is an article about compiler directives; or as they are commonly known, pragmas. It’s derived from a talk of a similar name that I gave last year at GopherChina in Shanghai.
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What does code readability mean?
Programmers complain about readability and talk about bad code and unclean code, and the difficulties they run into trying to understand and maintain that code. What do we mean by readability? What makes code unreadable?
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Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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Putting Apple’s iMac Pro Through the Paces
At the end of December, Apple made good on the release of the new iMac Pro and started selling and shipping the new workstations. While this could be characterized as a stop-gap effort until the ne…