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Chromium Blog: A Tale Of Two Pwnies (Part 2)
When we wrapped up our recent Pwnium event, we praised the creativity of the submissions and resolved to provide write-ups on how the two e...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
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Feynman's Clock
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
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The girl with the ANSI tattoo
I enjoyed the David Fincher remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo more than I thought I would. Rather than a shallow and cynical Holly...
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The THX Sound
The essential, funny guide to retro and future synths, guitars, music making, gear, gadgets and techology.
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The Art of Computer Typography
Ever since I came across Jürg Lehni’s essay on typographic technology and digital fonts, Typeface As Programme, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Donald E. Knuth and his unexpected contributions to typography. You see, Knuth is a professor and computer scientist well known to pr…
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A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)
Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions , and successfully bloc...
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When Rob Pike first met rms
I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career. === There's no such thing as ba...
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
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Common Lisp: The Untold Story
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986
Update: Date typo in post title fixed! I came across this on Google Books, going through some old issues of InfoWorld I’d read back in the day: Click = big For those who want text, see after …
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Jef Raskin's final gift to Aza (2010)
Studying how an individual's thoughts, emotions, ideas, and aspirations are formed through their interactions with others is the focus of social psychology as
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Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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Prof. dr. N.G. de Bruijn, 1918-2012
Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics
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John Nash's Letter to the NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
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