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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,419 posts.
Cracking Litter Box DRM
TLDR : My robot cat litter box bricks itself after a set number of washes with each soap cartridge so I reverse engineered and suppressed the verfication process to enable refilling.
Why Static Websites Need HTTPS
It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] and as I said at the
Service Workers
When authoring JavaScript for the browser, you don't think twice about embedding that JavaScript within an HTML document. Perhaps you load your script via a resource request, or embed it directly within a script tag, but in either scenario the lifecycle of your JavaScript is irrevocably married to its parent document.
Is Rails still relevant in 2018?
Few days ago I’ve received email where I was asked for an advice from a web developer who was considering switching from Ruby to something else. I was asked ...
Babel 7 Released
After almost 2 years, 4k commits, over 50 pre-releases, and a lot of help we are excited to announce the release of Babel 7. It's been almost 3 years since the release of Babel 6! There's a lot of moving parts so please bear with us in the first weeks of release. Babel 7 is a huge release: we've made it faster…
The NSA Continues to Violate Americans' Internet Privacy Rights
A federal court will be scrutinizing one of the National Security Agency’s worst spying programs on Monday. The case has the potential to restore crucial privacy protections for the millions of Americans who use the internet to communicate with family, friends, and others overseas.
How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
Multinational organisations are collaborating in the open on OpenStreetMap
A Road to Common Lisp
I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.
A little bit of the one-time MacOS version still lingers in ZFS
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Oops, I Wrote a C++ Compiler
TL;DR I wrote a .NET library that can compile C/C++ code into a byte code that it can also interpret. It is used in my app iCircuit to simulate Arduinos. You can use it yourself with the nuget package CLanguage.
Solve Less General Problems
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
The Real Deal About rel="me"
Earlier today , Barry Schwartz published a piece over on Search Engine Roundtable called Google Does Not Use rel=me Microformats . The article got shared around Twitter a lot, and those tweets surfaced on the microformats IRC channel . In it he mentions a few things that I would like to respond to, that is probably…
Programming War Stories: Connectix
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
Why Love Generative Art?
Over the last 50 years, our world has turned digital at breakneck speed. No art form has captured this transitional time period - our time period - better than generative art. Generative art takes full advantage of everything that computing has to offer, producing elegant and compelling artworks tha
Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server
NTP on a Raspberry-Pi - documents configuring a Raspberry Pi for headless operation, configuring NTP for remote monitoring, adding a GPS/PSS device (two discussed), and how well NTP performs in WAN-only, LAN, and PPS configurations.
Pseudo-bandlimited pixel art filtering in 3D: A mathematical derivation
Recently, I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler, and I’m very disappointed with the poor texture filtering seen in this game. It is PS1-level, with severe shimmering artifacts, which ruins the nice pixel art. Tastefully merging retro pixel art with 3D environment is a very cool aesthetic to me, so I want it to look…
Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)
Cause a series of sequential operations to appear instantaneous or simultaneous.
The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…