The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
A few months ago, British Airways' customers had their credit card details stolen. How was this possible? The best guess goes something like this: BA had 3rd party JS on its payment page <script src="https://example.com/whatever.js"></script> The 3rd party's site was hacked, and the JS was changed. BA's customers ran…
As a researcher/engineer (really, an algorithm developer) in the general area of audio and speech processing, I've always run into the same difficulty at all the companies I've worked at: How to quickly prototype and develop algorithms, and subsequently turn them into efficient code that can be deployed to customers.
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological…
2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…
Here's a talk on "Math And Analogies" I did for the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle. What's this? Well, it's a number. Probably written down a…
The vast majority of fiction on the web is nonergodic : stories presented as linear text. Yet, in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, literature can take on any shape imaginable. In recent years, some pieces have taken advantage of these capabilities—not as a gimmick, but in a way that is…
Maybe you were once advised to “look for the padlock” as a means of telling legitimate e-commerce sites from phishing or malware traps. Unfortunately, this has never been more useless advice. New research indicates that half of all phishing scams are now hosted on Web sites whose Internet address includes the padlock…
With OTP-21 came a new logging library in Erlang called logger . It comes as an attempt to offer a built-in alternative to long successful projects such as lager , which have seen years of battle testing and tweaking for performance. I've seen few articles written about the new logger and what it can do, so I've…
Sixteen years later, ES6/ES2015 introduced Unicode mode (the u flag) , sticky mode (the y flag) , and the RegExp.prototype.flags getter .
The new version 5 of SubEthaEdit , the Apple Design Award winning text editor for macOS, is now available free of charge in the App Store and as direct download . The complete source code with history going back 15 years is also available under the MIT License.
I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.
A short essay about Fortran in the modern world.
Apple’s case before the Supreme Court is about standing; Apple has a strong case. That, though, doesn’t mean the App Store isn’t a monopoly — and that Apple isn’t increasing…
Based on new research published today by BEUC’s Norwegian member Forbrukerrådet, seven consumer groups are filing complaints against Google with their national data protection authorities.
The editorial department of well-known Dutch broadcaster RTL News recently asked for my assistance. Multiple tax files of Dutch citizens had been published via www.docplayer.nl and no one could explain – where did these files come from? Who would have thought that my research would lead to the discovery of one of the…
A look into the rising trend of technology companies creating or commissioning typefaces for their exclusive use.
AI art using GANs (generative adversarial networks) is new enough that the art world does not understand it well enough to evaluate it. We saw this unfold last month when the French artists’ collective Obvious stumbled into selling their very first AI artwork for $450K at Christie’s . Many in th
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 1. lisp to assembly
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
A new type of banking scam involving fake business listings is taking over Google [3 min read]
Updated version If you haven’t read My Comparison Between Anki and SuperMemo, please do so. It’s not a prerequisite but if you do, you will understand the following content better.
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
