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The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
Gmail's "dots don't matter" feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,419 posts.
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Hash-based Signatures: An illustrated Primer
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
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Are unsound type systems wrong?
This is an essay I wrote early-2016. After battling with soundness vs. usability in Typed Clojure for many years, I was starting to reconsider the “obviously wrong” approach of baking unsoundness into the type system from the get-go. I look at some historical examples of intentional unsoundness in type systems, and…
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Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?
Human trafficking leaves no land untouched. In 2013 the U.S. State Department estimated that there are 27 million victims worldwide trafficked for forced labor or commercial sex exploitation. A 201…
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Apple’s New Ad Conversion Tracking Will Benefit User Privacy
Apple has released new developer APIs that will allow mobile advertising conversion tracking while protecting individual user privacy. The new APIs are part of the StoreKit framework and include a …
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Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
3158
Mill: Better Scala Builds
Mill is a new build tool for Scala: it compiles your Scala code, packages it, runs it, and caches things to avoid doing unnecessary work. Mill aims to be better than Scala's venerable old SBT build tool , learning from it's mistakes and building upon ideas from functional programming to come up with a build tool that…
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
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Multi-user VR experiences with A-Frame (2017)
Salva de la Puente describes the sharedspace component he's built, which brings the power of WebRTC to A-Frame users. The component provides a collaboration model where participants can join or ...
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A Virtual Machine
Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.
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The Stack Overflow Age
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.
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New features from the last few versions of Git
A look at the new features in recent Git releases.
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Before cancer kills, it cheats
Evolutionary biologist Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University delivered a lecture titled “Why Cancer is Everywhere” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
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C++17 Compiler Bug Hunt
Hey, if all I have is lemons – I have no choice but to make lemonade out of them! if reproducible serious bugs are ignored for many months, it indicates one ...
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Berkeley offers its data science course online for free
Data science is increasingly popular at Berkeley because the world is increasingly data-driven
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Payment Request API for Apple Pay
We’re pleased to announce that Safari 11.1 on macOS and Safari on iOS 11.3 now support the W3C Payment Request API for conducting Apple Pay transactions on the web.
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Secret Service Warns of Chip Card Scheme
The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a new scam involving the temporary theft of chip-based debit cards issued to large corporations. In this scheme, the fraudsters intercept new debit cards in the mail and replace the chips on the cards with chips from old cards. When the unsuspecting…
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Planets evenly spaced on log scale
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
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The secret life of NaN
The floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which is used to represent, well, values that aren’t numbers. Double precision ...
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Adult Neurogenesis – A Pointed Review
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
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The FBI could have broken into San Bernadino shooter's phone without Apple
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a new report that supports what EFF has long suspected: that the FBI’s legal fight with Apple in 2016 to create backdoor access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was more focused on creating legal precedent than...
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How did we end up with containers?
A short case study breaking down the interesting design aspects of containers.