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Moving from Ruby to Rust
How we migrated our Tier 1 service from ruby to rust and didn’t break production.
PostgreSQL 11 Reestablishes Window Functions Leadership
PostgreSQL 11 offers the best OVER clause support among its competitors, true procedures, and improvements in FETCH FIRST and XML.
Opening the Filecoin Project Repos
Today, we are excited to open several repos on GitHub, and invite everybody to join us on GitHub.
Winning the Blackbird Battle
We’re happy to report that on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion affirming a lower court decision dismissing the case brought by Blackbird Tech. This is the last step in the process, we’ve won.
Introducing draft pull requests
You can now use draft pull requests to clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress.
Better Language Models and Their Implications
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
The startup storyline being told may not be the most optimal. The mental clarity of separating your lifeline from your projects may be the most thoughtful choice.
Time Travel (2006)
Last time we talked about free will, superintelligent predictors, and Dr. Evil planning to destroy the earth from his moon base. Today I'd like to talk about a more down-to-earth topic: time travel. The first point I have to make is one that Carl Sagan made: we're all time travelers—at the rate of one second per…
A Love Letter to the People Who Build the Internet Archive
When you visit a public library, you get to meet the librarians and others who build and care for those collections. You know there are people who empty the garbage cans, who put back the borrowed books, who maintain the computers, and who determine what ends up on the shelf.
Problem solving with Unix commands
I am starting to realize that the Unix command-line toolbox can fix absolutely any problem related to text wrangling. Let me tell you about a problem I had, and how I used some Unix command-line utilities to solve it.
Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend
Red Hat Satellite is a complex offering and we wanted to spend some time talking about the underlying databases that make Satellite work as well as some upcoming changes to this underlying database structure that you should be aware of.
Linux Reverse Engineering CTFs for Beginners
After a while, I decided a write a short blog post about Linux binary reversing CTFs in general. How to approach a binary and solving for beginners. I personally am not a fan of Linux reverse engin…
Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes
Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.
A proof that Unix utility sed is Turing complete
Many people are surprised to learn that `sed`, a seemingly simple text filtering program, is actually Turing complete. This realization prompts the question: how can a text processing utility achieve such computational power? The answer lies in sed's fundamental operations. Essentially, sed functions as a miniature...
Fast Perfect Hashing
A perfect hash function is one that is collision-free. By implication, the hash must be at least as many bytes as the key and the function is theoretically reversible, though not always tractably so. In other words, perfect hashing is a special case of encryption. Because the hash is no smaller than the key, the…
Making a Menger sponge in stained glass
Over the course of six weeks in January and February 2019, I took an introduction to stained glass course from Olivia Vavroch at Vavroch Glass Studio in north Portland, OR.
Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse