3571
Put 1.7MB onto 1.44MB Floppies (1999)
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
3572
Buy Yourself a Latte
A Latte a Day Isn’t Going to Ruin Your Retirement If spending $5 a day on fancy coffee puts your retirement at risk, you’ve got bigger problems. Bloomberg, April 3, 2019 Sorry, but no. If a daily latte is the difference between achieving your financial success or suffering devastating failure, then there…Read More
3573
Correctness – A paradigm for sustainable software development
Edit (2019-04-09): A quick qualifier for future readers. This post talks about correctness in the sense of correct code and not formal proofs or formal specifications. I refer to correctness in the sense of avoidable runtime errors.
3574
Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017)
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
3575
Should you be concerned about LastPass uploading your passwords to its server?
The answer to this question is still "Yes!" Here I demonstrate yet another way for the server to access your data, the issues being structural.
3576
Running VSCode in Docker
A portable development environment, from editor to dependencies.
3577
Groups of Homeless People
After modest amounts of research, here is how I am currently categorizing the homeless problem. This should be taken as a snapshot of my thoughts, not information for people who have actually thoug…
3578
The 3dfx Voodoo1
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
3579
3580
Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming
Detailing Mozilla's failures to send newsletters only to users who actually opted in.
3581
Inverse Live Coding: A practice for learning web development
I finished my first semester teaching at the University of Michigan. I taught EECS 493 User Interface Development all on the Web. It was a tough class for me since I had never before this class use…
3582
Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016)
Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works.
3583
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report
We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents. These tragedies continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and minds, and we extend our sympathies to the loved ones of the...
3584
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
3585
3586
3587
Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it
A while ago, I put 16 GB of RAM into one of my computers. The computer is using a Foxconn P55MX motherboard with a Core i5 750. It’s old and could probably be replaced, but it still works for what I need.
3588
Idiomatic Monads in Rust
A pragmatic new design for high-level abstractions Monads (and, more generally, constructs known as “higher kinded types”) are a tool for high-level abstraction in programming languages1. Historically, there has been a lot of debate inside (and outside) the Rust community about whether monads would be a useful…
3589
PostgreSQL Performance on Raspberry Pi
Have you ever wondered how well PostgreSQL performs on a Raspberry Pi 3B ? Oh. You haven't? Oh well, I asked myself that question and put it to the test. This post covers how I used pgbench to answer this question and the results of what I found.
3590
3591
Banish missing glyphs with Unifont
The GNU Unifont project is amazing. It contains every Unicode glyph in one single file! I am going to argue that you should bundle it with your apps, your operating systems, and - at a pinch - your websites. The Unifont is a perfect fallback font. If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported…
3592
Combine statistical and symbolic artificial intelligence techniques
MIT researchers show that merging statistical and symbolic artificial intelligence promises to enable computers to reason more like humans. Their hybrid model can learn object-related concepts like color and shape, and leverage that knowledge to interpret complex relationships.
3593
What Is Idempotence?
Idempotence means duplicates don't matter. It means you can safely retry an operation with no issues. The classic example is the elevator button: you press it twice and it does not call two elevators. We explore why we would want that property in an email server.
3594
But I'm Not a Lawyer, I'm an Agent
Just over a quarter century ago, when I was a young scribbler traipsing around the metro desk of the Baltimore Sun, I had an early opportunity to learn a lesson about money, about ethics, about capitalism and, in particular, about the American entertainment industry. And Dorothy Simon, she raised no fools. I only…
3595
Geek Social Fallacies (2003)
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
3596
Unreasonable Effectiveness of SQL
Read Couchbase engineering tutorials, product news, and customer stories on AI agents, Capella, vector search, mobile sync, and real-time analytics.
3597
Malicious remote code execution backdoor discovered bootstrap-sass Ruby gem
On March 26, 2019, a malicious version of the popular bootstrap-sass package, that has been downloaded a total of 28 million times to date, was published to the official RubyGems repository.
3598
Microsoft finds privilege escalation vulnerability in Huawei driver
Our discovery of two privilege escalation vulnerabilities in a driver highlights the strength of Microsoft Defender ATP’s sensors. These sensors expose anomalous behavior and give SecOps personnel the intelligence and tools to investigate threats, as we did.
3599
Two More Cases of Third-Party Facebook App Data Exposure
Third-party Facebook apps gather Facebook data about the people who use them. While Facebook struggles to contain these exposures, insecure third-party data practices & misconfigured cloud systems continue to leak Facebook data to the internet. See how UpGuard discovered and secured two such cases.
3600
Defence Against the Docker Arts
Recently, we expanded Heroku’s industry-shaping primitives, adding support for client-side browser apps, composed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This built-in support for static web apps joins the existing Heroku Buildpacks: Ruby, Python, Go, Java, Clojure, Scala, Node.js, PHP, and .NET.