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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,400 posts.
KDE makes Qt
Recently I was trying some statistics on the qtbase-module (where QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets and so on lives) and was wondering who made them. Not based on their current paid affilation, like Thiago’s graphs , but if each commit was made by a person coming from KDE.
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
Planjure: A* and Dijkstra's in Om
I wrote Planjure to learn ClojureScript and Om. It’s a fun little program. You paint islands on a canvas and run path-planning algorithms to find the optimal path for your ship to traverse from start to finish. Sailing across blue ocean is faster than hiking through green islands. The three algorithms implemented are…
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage (2010)
To get the latest updates and information on ALL of the Storage Pod versions: Click Here. When we started Backblaze, our goal was to provide unlimited
Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
Will It Optimize? (2010)
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
Don't run 'strings' on untrusted files
Many shell users, and certainly most of the people working in computer forensics or other fields of information security, have a habit of ru...
Why Amazon Has No Profits
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
How Verizon's Advertising Header Works
Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header. 1
Porsche: The Hedge Fund That Also Made Cars
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
MIT computer scientists can predict the price of Bitcoin
CSAIL/LIDS team's algorithm doubles initial investment in under two months.
Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?
Who actually checks the permissions of applications they’re installing? A little while ago a Paypal update stalled because it required extra permissions. This is what happens if an app you have already installed wants more power. I was more than a little surprised with what I found.
Why Samsung Knox Isn't Really a Fort Knox
UPDATE #2: Apparently Samsung said in their press release that user should try out My Knox, as Knox Personal is deprecated. I just tried t...
How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
*Note: Please read all italicized technical words as if they were in a foreign language. The fall semester of my senior year, I was having some serious self-confidence issues. I had slowly come to …
X86 boot sector written in C (2010)
Writing an MS-DOS-compatible boot sector in C: parsing the FAT BIOS parameter block, finding IO.SYS, and loading it via BIOS INT 13h in real mode.
The Case of the Modified Binaries
SUMMARY After creating and using a new exitmap module, I found downloaded binaries being patched through a Tor exit node in Russia. Tor is a wonderful tool for protecting the identity of journalists, their sources, and even regular users around the world; however, anonymity does
Calories in, calories out
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction How do we lose (or gain) weight? Is it really as simple as “calories in, calories out” (i.e., eat less than you burn), or i…
Mono for Unreal Engine
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
EFF Relaunches Surveillance Self-Defense Guide
We’re thrilled to announce the relaunch of Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD), our guide to defending yourself and your friends from digital surveillance by using encryption tools and developing appropriate privacy and security practices. The site launches today in English, Arabic, and Spanish, with...