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Internet in a Box
I have finished my cruise now, which was mostly holiday, but also some work. I did some training for my mates (mainly in C coding) and we di...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
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The Zen of Go
This article was derived from my GopherCon Israel 2020 presentation. It’s also quite long. If you’d prefer a shorter version, head over to the-zen-of-go.netlify.com .
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Systems Thinking and Quality
Wise words from Russell Ackoff regarding systems thinking and quality improvement – and what we can learn from them
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Production-Oriented Development
Throughout my career, I’ve developed some opinions. Some have worn particularly deep ruts, reinforced by years of experience. I tried to…
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Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me
For decades, I have been talking about the importance of individual privacy. For almost as long, I have been using the metaphor of digital feudalism to describe how large companies have become central control points for our data. And for maybe half a decade, I have been talking about the world-sized robot that is the…
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Should you self-host Google Fonts?
A deep dive into the performance implications of using Google Fonts (good and bad) and whether self-hosting is better.
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Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
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How important are 'economies of scale'?
How important are 'economies of scale' in production and innovation?
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Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer
“Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones,” by Adam J. Aviv. Benjamin Sapp, Matt Blaze, and Jonathan M. Smith. Abstract: Modern smartphones are equipped with a plethora of sensors that enable a wide range of interactions, but some of these sensors can be employed as a side channel to surreptitiously…
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Discord is not an acceptable choice for free software projects
It’s simple: free software projects should not use Discord. (This goes equally for any sort of public interest group.) Here’s why. TL;DR: Standardizing on…
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Domain Logic and SQL (2003)
A long-form article entitled: "Domain Logic and SQL"
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Beyond Bézier Curves (2013)
There is a new feature of Pages and Keynote, not mentioned in any of Apple’s publicity nor in any press coverage I’ve seen, that is really very interesting. Perhaps it will even one day prove to ha…
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Suspicious Discontinuities
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
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Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
This is a translation/guest post by Riku Merikoski. The original can be found here (in Finnish). All mistakes due to translation are my fault. On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical hap…
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The Law of Conservation of Complexity
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?" Larry Tesler's original law regarding complexity in software applications, and links to articles and pap
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Stop adding email tracking links to phone numbers
My Chinese takeaway delivery was late. Very late. I flipped open the confirmation email sent by Just-Eat to double-check I had all the details correct. At the bottom was a "click to call" link. Hurrah! I clicked dial, and this is what filled my screen: An absurdly long phone number. Bemused, I went to inspect the link…
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The Next Leap in Self-Driving: Prediction
Why prediction has overtaken perception as the biggest challenge in the field.
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Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 home server
With the release of the raspberry pi 4, which features a 1.5 Ghz processor, 1-4 Gb RAM, built-in networking and USB 3.0 ports, I decided to finally take the plunge and set up a home server with the pi. In this post we will go through setting up and configuring the pi to do 2 main things: 1) function as a media center…
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Hackers Were Inside Citrix for Five Months
Networking software giant Citrix Systems says malicious hackers were inside its networks for five months between 2018 and 2019, making off with personal and financial data on company employees, contractors, interns, job candidates and their dependents. The disclosure comes almost a year after Citrix acknowledged that…
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Teardown of a $1.25 LED Lightbulb
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
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Want to call C from Python? Use D
In my last blog post I wrote about the power of D’s compile-time reflection and string mixins, showing how they could be used to call D from Python so easily it might as well be magic. As ama…
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How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
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I Worked for a Criminal Organization
That time I was employed by a criminal organization I was employed by Micfo for several months, I quickly determined that they were shady and invovled in illegal practices. I did not quit because of that, I quit because I felt unwanted, by HR and Management. Later they would ask me to come back. This is the full…
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Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems
Patterns and structures of current operating systems and some thoughts about how that could be improved, with lessons learnt from Self, Smalltalk and other "structured" systems.
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Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
I was reviewing some stats for Mailintel and was curious about what email service top apps use; being particularly interested in transactional email services. Is there a way I can go through my mai...