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Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks
This post is based on the talk of the same name I gave at the Arrrrcamp conference in Ghent, Belgium on October 2nd, 2014. You can find the slides here and the video recording here .
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
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The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros
Blog and Portfolio site for Forrest Smith, aka ForrestTheWoods
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Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI, Part 2
A guide to visual aesthetics, written by a nerd
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Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen
An experiment to understand how the discrepancy between logical and native screen dimensions on the iPhone 6 Plus affects rendering quality.
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Google disables SSL search at BT’s request
Update – Since this was posted, Max Allan and Damion Yates have investigated further and found that BT are intercepting DNS queries and replying with doctored DNS results, which I didn’…
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Queues Don't Fix Overload
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
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How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
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The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype
The TechCrunch Bubble Index quantifies the startup funding environment by counting the number of headlines on TechCrunch relating to startup fundraises
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Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI
A non-artsy primer in digital aesthetics
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The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
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Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…
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68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
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An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language
Alright, guys. Today I want to talk about programming. It is interesting to note that I have solved it. Yes, I solved it. Here are my…
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You only get 1,000 lines of code a week
Choose to do only the things that nobody else can do.
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Why curl defaults to stdout
(Recap: I founded the curl project, I am still the lead developer and maintainer) When asking curl to get a URL it'll send the output to stdout by default. You can of course easily change this behavior with options or just using your shell's redirect feature, but without any option it'll spew it out to … Continue…
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Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is…
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VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC
WebRTC is one of the most exciting things to happen to the Web in years: it has the potential to bring instant voice and video calling to anyone with a browser, finally unshackling us from propriet…
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The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)
There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…
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Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)
It might be thought that special relativity provides a short negative answer to this question. In actual fact, there are many trivial ways in which things can be going faster than light (FTL) in a sense, and there may be other more genuine possibilities. On the other hand, there are also good reasons to believe that…
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What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, …
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The Move from Linux to FreeBSD
About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes.That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes [...]