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Why do database columns have a character length of 191?
`varchar(191)` is such an odd number - how did we get here?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,820 posts.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
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Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…
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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
The next generation of sound on Apple Music is coming to subscribers June 2021 at no additional cost.
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How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
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A Pixel Purse LED Cube Controlled by a Cisco 3G Modem
I presented this project at BangBangCon West 2020, but never got around to publish a blog post about it. A 10 minute talk is not enough to cover some technical aspects, and since I’m starting to forget them, it’s about time to write things down.
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The ClickHouse Community
Slack is a new way to communicate with your team. It’s faster, better organized, and more secure than email.
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The Achilles Heel of the Coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 is critically dependent on a special mechanism for the production of its proteins. A collaborative team led by a research group at ETH Zurich obtained molecular insights into this process and demonstrated that it can be inhibited by chemical compounds, thereby significantly reducing viral replication in…
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The search for a perfect access control system
Making sense of authorization, policy and access management systems.
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An iOS app update that annoys me
Almost a year ago I started using a delightful little iOS app called Receipt Box. It did exactly what I wanted: I could tap in an expense and a category, and the app added a geo location to the exp...
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Replacing Elasticsearch with Rust and SQLite (2017)
Caveat: Elasticsearch is a multi-purpose, distributed, battle-tested, schema-free, log and document storage engine. We’ll be replacing it with a single-purpose, relational schema, me-tested, and custom nginx access log storage engine. Knowing that, let’s begin. Find this project on Github After building my home…
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Building a personal website in 2021
This post sparked quite a discussion on hackernews. You can read all the interesting comments in this thread. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
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Half a million lines of Go
By Kevin Dangoor Back in December 2019, I first wrote about Goliath, Khan Academy’s project to migrate our ... Read more
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Paper Notes
How I finally became the kind of person who carries a paper notebook and a pen
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Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Event on Linux?
This article is dedicated to discussing why it's so hard to detect the 'key up' or 'key release' event in a Linux terminal environment without relying on X server. Several techniques and code examples will be shown that are capable of detecting the keyup event on Linux (with and without an X server), but all…
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Observing my cellphone switch towers
One of my favorite books is 2013 "High Performance Browser Networking" by Ilya Grigorik. Besides a wealth of actionable advice, the book is illustrated with captivating real life stories.
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The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to…
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I have a lot to say about Signal’s Cellebrite hack
This blog post is based off of a talk I gave on May 12, 2021 at the Stanford Computer Science Department’s weekly lunch talk series on computer security topics. Full disclosure: I’ve done some consulting work for Signal, albeit not on anything like this issue. (I kinda doubt
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Making Your Own Tools
Listen in your podcast player by searching for Feeling of Computing , or via Apple Podcasts | Overcast | RSS
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Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)
JavaScript has come a long way since I knew it as the “D” in DHTML. For anyone like me, who’s been reluctant to use the latest syntax that could require polyfills or a transpiler, I’ve written this cheatsheet to get you caught up on all the goodness that’s widely supported in modern browsers.
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The stack monoid revisited
This is a followup to my previous post on the stack monoid, but is intended to be self-contained.
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Things you can’t do in Rust (and what to do instead)
Transposing other language paradigms to Rust often reveals unforeseen issues. Here are some limitations of Rust and how to work around them.
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Faster web fonts
Fine-tune your font files and optimise your loading strategy for maximum speed + minimum FOUT
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The Return of Fancy Tools
Dreamweaver as a low-code local-first native app