3031
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
3032
Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
3033
Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
3034
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
3035
Anonymous Source Shared Leaked Google Search API Documents
Update: We are diving deep into the Google API leak and what it means for marketers in our next episode of SparkToro Office Hours on June 27. Join Michael
3036
WP21
It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’…
3037
Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One compan...
3038
Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. JWT stands for JSON Web Tokens, a reasonably well defined standard for authenticated tokens. Specifically they have a header with format information, a payload, and a signature or message authentication code. The core idea is that whoever has the corresponding verification…
3039
Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization [1] . Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean…
3040
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
3041
Possible association between tattoos and lymphoma
Lund University. Our knowledge regarding the long-term health effects of tattoos is currently poor, and there is not a lot of research within this area. Now a research group at Lund University has investigated the association between tattoos and lymphoma.
3042
My new PSU burns out – I fix it, and torture it by cracking water
My brand new PSU, themost complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, startedlife in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I gott...
3043
xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
xAI is pleased to announce our series B funding round of $6 billion.
3044
Is regulated BGP security coming?
What impact would regulating BGP routing security have on the global Internet?
3045
3046
Evolution of the ELF object file format
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…
3047
The one-year anniversary of my total glossectomy
One year ago today, I went into surgery expecting that I’d lose half my tongue to a squamous cell carcinoma recurrence. The evening before, Bess and I got legally married;[1] it was a short, but ch…
3048
macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
3049
Old dogs, new CSS tricks
A lot of new CSS features have shipped in the last years, but actual usage is still low. One of the biggest barriers: we need to re-wire our own brains.
3050
Long distance sound localization with the Raspberry Pi
TDOA Sound Localization is determining the source of a sound when all you know is the differences in the time of arrival of the sound event…
3051
3052
Mediocre Engineer's Guide to HTTPS
As a mediocre engineer, I took Internet and HTTPS communication for granted and never dove any deeper. Today we’re improving as engineers and learning a rough overview of how internet communication works, specifically focusing on HTTP and TLS.
3053
Feynman's Garden
The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…
3054
3055
Low-latency scripting for game engines
The basics condensed into one very large document
3056
How Home Assistant is being used to protect from missile and drone attacks
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant
3057
The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success
Reflections on a Wall Street legend.
3058
GRC SpinRite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
3059
Chickens in Trees
I was lucky enough to vacation in Kauai last year, one of the oldest Hawaiian islands. If you ever visit, the first thing that you’ll notice — the very first thing — is the chickens.
3060
Simplicity – Google SRE Handbook (2017)
Operational simplicity in aodrqew, balancing stability and agility to enhance reliability, reduce complexity, and focus on impactful innovation.