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Developer tools can be magic but instead collect dust
Three research developer tools that made programmers dramatically faster (Reflexion Models, the WhyLine, MatchMaker), and why none still run.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
2642
No, I did not hack your MS Exchange server
New data suggests someone has compromised more than 21,000 Microsoft Exchange Server email systems worldwide and infected them with malware that invokes both KrebsOnSecurity and Yours Truly by name.
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Piano Practice Software Progress
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the…
2646
Bitcoin as a Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Bitcoin at first was “weird internet money” and then it was “a protocol” and then it was “digital gold”. Ethereum is “ICOs”, or maybe “DeFi”, or maybe “Web3”, or maybe all three, or maybe something...
2647
The Actual OSI Model
I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that…
2648
Epic corporate jargon alternatives
I’m working on a list of corporate jargon alternatives. There are already plenty of resources telling you what you should be saying instead, such as “soon” for “ASAP” or “waiting” for “holding pattern” and the like. But they usually lack that flair of ostentation we have come to be accustomed to. Therefore, I had the…
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Open source is not a business model (2018)
Person 1: Did you know that 60% of restaurants close within three years of opening ?
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Better Architecture Diagrams for Agile Teams: actionable tips and lessons
From the finding of the diagram’s goal and audience to review checklist
2651
Shitty Software Kills People
How the public healthcare system in Italy is using software to support the vaccination effort is appaling. I’ve spent a good part of the last 30 years trying to convince people that software is imp…
2652
Congress demands tech CEOs censor the internet even more aggressively
The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.
2653
Sam Fussell: An interview with the author of Muscle (2014)
Michael J. Joyner, M.D. June 10, 2014 In 1991 Sam Fussell published the book “Muscle” about his experiences in body building. The book tells the story of how he went from being a good 6-4, 170 pound college soccer player to a committed body builder about 100 pounds heavier. It is perhaps the best
2654
English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
English is a (relatively) simple language to learn enough of to communicate (rather than to master) because it’s had so many non-native adults learning and using it.
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Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper
The scientific reason, explained
2656
Does Amazon make more from ads than AWS?
Does Amazon make more money from ads than AWS? Quite possibly.
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
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Apt Encounters of the Third Kind
A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind. It was definitely a first for me, and I was kindly granted permission to outline the events in this blog post. This investigation started scary but turned out be quite fun, and I hope reading it will be informative to you too…
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It Doesn't Work
8 AM. Like any other day, I take a quick glance at my GitHub notifications via Octobox.
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How to implement a hash table in C
An explanation of how to implement a simple hash table data structure, with code and examples in the C programming language.
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I Like That the Boat Is Stuck
I know it's bad that the boat is stuck, but I like that the boat is stuck.
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Transiting the Suez Canal in a Private Sailboat (2003)
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2663
Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
It's time to put my water cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster to the test. I put it up against my MacBook and a Windows PC to see which performed best
2664
A “Better C” Benchmark
An unusual benchmark for programming languages, designed to replace C. Unlike many other benchmarks, this one measures developer productivity and performance.
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Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with one weird trick
As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark …
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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Last night I was listening to the latest Under the Radar , where Marco Arment dove into nerdy detail about his recent Overcast server issues. The discussion was great, and you should listen to it, but Marco's recent server troubles were pretty similar to my own server issues from last year, and so I figured I'd share…
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Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code
Full-text search is everywhere. From finding a book on Scribd, a movie on Netflix, toilet paper on Amazon, or anything else on the web through Google (like [how to do your job as a software engineer](https://localghost.dev/2019/09/everything-i-googled-in-a-week-as-a-professional-software-engineer/)), you've searched…
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SQLite is not a toy database
Here is why SQLite is a perfect tool for you - whether you are a developer, data analyst, or geek.
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1982: The Hobbit
Veronika Megler just wanted a part-time job while she finished her college degree. She didn't realize it would end with her writing one of the first computer game blockbusters.
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The Joy of Condensed Matter
I published a slightly different version of this article in Nautilus on February 24, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, SmolinR…