3031
Mimicking a device is becoming almost impossible
From User-Agent tricks to canvas hashes, see how modern device detection—Picasso, fonts, emojis, touch—makes spoofing fail. Learn how to blend in safely.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,820 posts.
3032
Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood
From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted ...
3033
The school for sysadmins who can’t timesync good
(With apologies to Derek Zoolander and Justin Steven. And to whoever had to touch the HP-UX NTP setup at Queensland Police after I...
3034
So you want to build a house more efficiently
Construction productivity is a topic that has interested me for years. When an engineer sees an inefficient process with no improvement, it ticks them off. Construction is error-prone, expensive, and suffers delays. The government thinks construction productivity has slightly decreased since 1960. It just needs some…
3035
When it comes to Git history, less is more
One person's entry-level contribution is another person's difficult bugfix or backport.
3036
Reddit’s disrespectful design
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
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3038
Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2
Credit to Brad Sams for first reporting on this, Alongside the Windows 11 announcement today, Rish Tandon, the CVP Engineering for Microsoft Teams, posted on Twitter about changes coming to Microsoft Teams architecture. It gave a lot of useful insight into what is coming. Microsoft Teams is...
3039
Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
I am grumpy. As my very clever wife summarised, I hate when designers prioritise their æsthetic preferences over my usability needs. I tried sharing a website using Google Chrome for Android. I hit the share button, and a panel popped-up from the bottom of the screen. Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I…
3040
Chris Avellone about why he “didn’t fight any of this”
Since “updates” can usually get lost in the noise, the most recent updates are put first.
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3042
Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
3043
Functors and Monads for People Who Have Read Too Many “Tutorials”
Title is literally true. This may not be the best place to learn about these concepts for the first time, because I'm going to focus on knocking down the misconceptions about them.
3044
Correctly implementing a spinlock in Modern C++
I’ve seen a lot of poorly implemented spinlocks floating around the internet.
3045
Goodbye C++, Hello C
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
3046
Group Video Calls
Today's update lets you turn on your camera or share your screen during Voice Chats in groups – on all devices, including tablets and desktops. This brings voice chats to a whole new level, ready for online classes, business meetings and family gatherings.
3047
Querying Parquet with Precision Using DuckDB
DuckDB, a free and open source analytical data management system, can run SQL queries directly on Parquet files and automatically take advantage of the advanced features of the Parquet format.
3048
A man whose software ate the world
Marc Andreessen on building, COVID, and how the Internet is taking us back to previous forms of thinking
3049
Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech?
The Judiciary Committee voted 21-20 to split up Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. What happened was unbelievable.
3050
Notes on streaming large API responses
I started a Twitter conversation last week about API endpoints that stream large amounts of data as an alternative to APIs that return 100 results at a time and require …
3051
Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral
Study of almost 3 million Facebook and Twitter posts from US media and politicians shows divisive posts dunking on opponents drives engagement on social media.
3052
Hierarchical Structures in PostgreSQL (2020)
Modelling hierarchical/team/categorical/tag data with arbitrary depths.
3053
AWS acquires Wickr
We’re excited to share that AWS has acquired Wickr, an innovative company that has developed the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology. With Wickr, customers and partners benefit from advanced security features not available with traditional communications services – across messaging…
3054
Moving from Hey to Fastmail
A summary on my personal experience and how you can do it too!
3055
AWS BugBust
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS Announces AWS BugBust
3056
Go 1.17 is deprecating the traditional use of 'go get'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past
The success of an open source browser game called Friday Night Funkin tells us where "instant games" might go. Hint: we've been here before.
3059
Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform
Mozilla teams up with Princeton University researchers to enable crowdsourced science for public good; collaborates with research groups at Princeton, Stan
3060
The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021140 points54 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second part (I, II, III, IV, V) of a series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as …