The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,153 posts.
This post is the third article in a series of blog posts about rsync, see the Series Overview. With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works. How does rsync work? When talking about the rsync protocol, we need to distinguish between:
I’m going to get straight to the point and say that it’s time for Robertson screws to be retired and supplanted by Torx. This posting is to explain why and is partly motivated by lots o…
The average is a myth. Understand the pitfalls of the average and how it can conceal useful information. How the US Air Force threw out the average and saved lives. Use distributions to better understand your data.
Semi-Automated Clothes Tracker using NFC Buttons
Scientists are developing artificial photosynthesis to help make food production more energy-efficient here on Earth, and one day possibly on Mars
We are splitting our database into Main and CI to improve the scalability and reliability of GitLab.com.
With an eye toward performance, interoperability, or legacy concerns, low-level system software often must parse binary encoded data formats. Few tools are available for this task, especially since the formats involve a mixture of arithmetic and data dependence, beyond what can be handled by typical parser generators…
A fun, small, affordable, and beautifully-crafted media player that’s easy to transfer files to, and sounds excellent.
No matter where you go, there you are If you're like me, you travel occasionally. Access to your office from home, or from an airport loun...
tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found it so useful I wrote a free online guide to help others learn it. Then I decided the guide wasn’t good enough and wrote Practical TLA+ in 2018. Then I decided the…
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
We all know that to create an interactive front end for your website you need JavaScript. Not just vanilla JS, mind: we're in 2022, and to create an…
The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky , the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted…
We have a plan to prevent 2 billion tons CO2e in the next 10 years by collecting and destroying superpotent refrigerants.
I'll show you what good logging is with real-life examples. Most people don't know what to log, so they end up creating just noise....
Developer Spotlight is a series highlighting interesting Swift developers from around the world. This post is authored by Ron Avitzur, author of the Pacific Tech Graphing Calculator.
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
A deep dive into the Feynman Technique, a method designed to learn through teaching. How can we upgrade it with a few teaching principles?
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
Kaspersky experts have brought to light a poorly detected SessionManager backdoor that was set up as a malicious module within the Internet Information Services (IIS), a popular web server edited by Microsoft. Once propagated, SessionManager enables a wide range of malicious activities, starting from collecting emails…
Apparently, the first system breakdown of a driverless robot taxi fleet occurred. In San Francisco, at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the i…
The W3C Member review of the Decentralized Identifier (DID) 1.0 Proposed Recommendation concluded with Formal Objections from three organizations.
Message signaled interrupts or MSIs describe a way to signal an interrupt without a dedicated interrupt request pin (IRQ). One of the most prevalent uses for MSIs is the PCI bus, and the PCI specification defines the MSI and MSI-X standards. The potential benefits may include: (1) reduced number of direct wires from…
The previous release was version 8.2 in December 2019. Since the latest source code is always available on GitHub, many have already picked up later patch versions (there are more than 5000 of them!). Therefore the changes have already been tried out by many users. On top of that bugs have been fixed, security issues…
It's can't just be an excuse — we need to improve our policies
MIT engineers have flown the first silent, fuel-free “ion plane.” The light aircraft is the first plane to fly with no propellers, turbine blades, or other moving parts.
