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Mercury Colonization
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
Functors, applicatives, and monads in pictures
Aditya Bhargava's personal blog.
CDN vs S3
As I said in my last post: S3 is NOT a CDN. It is an amazing Simple Storage Service, not a Simple Delivery Service. Via AWS: Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make...
The Three Kinds of Laziness
We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time eating and sleeping. The second is to tell yourself, "Someone like me will never manage to perfect themselves." In...
A Profanity-Laced Video Game Password That Breaks Everything
Most of these passwords were gibberish that required a pen-and-paper to write down and remember. One password, however, is more memorable, and much more sinister.
How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners
Here’s version 2 (September 2013). You can print this at 16.5″x10.75″ at 300dpi. Have an ordinary printer? Check out PosteRazor !
The History of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” Album Art
I had no intention of ever learning this much about Joy Division or pulsars, but because of my apt to be a law abiding citizen, I was forced to research the about the ubiquitous design made popular by the British band and artist Peter Saville for a t-shirt project I’m heading on SixPrizes. In short, […]
EFF now accepting Bitcoin again
Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be accepting Bitcoin donations through our website. You can use them to make one-time donations, set up monthly donations or get an EFF membership (which includes awesome membership swag like EFF hats and digital freedom t-shirts).While we are accepting...
Creating Shazam in Java
This domain is available for sale. Check out price, information and more on Dovendi.com
Fish shell 2.0
fish 2.0 is now released! fish is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that is smart and user-friendly. fish supports powerful features like syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that just work, with nothing to learn or configure.
Welcome Kevin, Michael, Steve, Dalton, and Andrew
YC has a bunch of announcements about people coming and going so I thought I’d do them all at once. Wufoo (YC W06) cofounder Kevin Hale is joining us as a partner. He was the force behind Wufoo’s much-admired design, and speaks widely about UX. Between Kevin and Garry Tan, we’ll now have two partners who are…
Memory Allocators 101
For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of patches to tcmalloc, Google's super high performance memory allocator. I'm going to post about them soon, but first I thought it would be cool to give some background about what a memory allocator actually does. So, if you've ever wondered what happens when you…
D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
RethinkDB 1.5 released: secondary indexes, soft durability, perf improvements
We are pleased to announce RethinkDB 1.5 ( The Graduate), so go download it now !
How to automatically choose a camera viewing angle for any 3D model
When I wrote stljs, a library to read, write, and convert STL to PNG, one of the things I had to decide was how to calculate where the camera was located and where to point the camera. You want to …
Exploiting a Go Binary
Earlier this year, tylerni7 showed us a proof of concept for a 32 bit Go exploit using this issue . geohot and I had a wager over who could get the first remote code execution on play.golang.org : he won, but just barely ;-). Props also to ricky for helping to find the underlying cause/writing the patch. Here is a…