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Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital ... Read more
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
2312
Computer work lying down comfortably with a home-made stand over the bed
This article reports the result of a successful personal attempt to find an arrangement of keyboard, mouse and monitor for lying down comfortably while using a computer. It describes the arrangement and reports experiences using it. It does not discuss general motivations for working lying down.
2313
The Worst (2012)
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
2317
JSON and Virtual Columns in SQLite
Faster JSON handling in a relational database.
2318
Web3 is expensive P2P
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
2319
Stealing checks worth millions and pwning a bank
Another long (hacker) story of mine! Once upon a time contracted to do a penetration test on a bank… I spent the better part of a week assessing every nook and cranny of the main web application. I mapped every function, and every web path, but the main website was very hardened. After spending a lot of time…
2320
Many software companies are a joke
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the YAML
Something I miss after emigrating from the UK to the USA is the using the name of a yeast extract based spread as an adjective. To describe something as “marmite”
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I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it. Here's what I know.
2325
Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
2329
The problem with Bitcoin miners
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
2330
Who owns the copyright to my medical images? (2018)
I popped round to an NHS dentist a few months ago - and they stuck my head on one of these contraptions. The Kodak 8000C takes a panoramic X-ray, giving a superior view of your teeth. Nifty. The dentist showed me where my wisdom teeth were and I was impressed with how high resolution the image was. Afterwards, I asked…
2331
Golang Diaries: Generics
My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina , an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I…
2332
Liberating out-of-copyright photos from SmartFrame's DRM
During the middle of the 20th Century, the UK's Royal Air Force took thousands of photographs of the country from above. Think of it like a primitive Google Earth. Those photographs are "Crown Copyright". For photographs created before 1st June 1957, the copyright expires after 50 years. Recently, the organisation…
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Own your calendar and contacts with OpenBSD, Baïkal, and FOSS Android
Writer for Semaphore and ButterCMS. Previously Staff Engineer at Deliveroo and in technical leadership at various public sector organisations.
2334
A lock-free, concurrent, generic queue in 32 bits
While considering concurrent queue design I came up with a generic, lock-free queue that fits in a 32-bit integer. The queue is “generic” in that a single implementation supports elements of any arbitrary type, despite an implementation in C. It’s lock-free in that there is guaranteed system-wide progress. It can…
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You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
2336
Wrong by Default
A few programming languages use a “defer” pattern for resource cleanup. This is a construct such as a defer keyword which schedules cleanup code to run at the end of the enclosing block (or function). This is available in Zig, Go and even in GCC C.
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Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
2339
The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlled over the internet by a python script running openCV reading the camera image of my old iPhone. Introduction The pigeons in my backyard find particular pleasures in voiding their excrements onto my balcony. Dissatisfied with this…
2340
Can we make a black hole? And if we could, what could we do with it?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science