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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
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Surviving Depression
Profound sadness is what I have experienced for most part of the last decade...
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Reverse engineering a camera protocol for fun and profit
Way back in late 2019 , I dissected a Reolink B800 IP camera to demonstrate the various parts of an embedded Linux system. It’s fairly nice hardware, actually—it has a 4K video sensor, a microphone, power over Ethernet, and is nominally waterproof. And yes, it runs Linux.
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Tired of note-taking apps
I’m tired of note-taking apps. It’s not because of limited choices. But it’s the other way around. There are so many note-taking apps you could try but end up sticking to none. At…
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Video Games Are the Future of Education
The best educational experiences I had as a teenager were all video games.
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eBay is port scanning visitors to their website
Websites are scanning for open ports on your PC to help fight fraud, but this data also flows into a massive, global tracking database.
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68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. Here are the first five bits: Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even … Continue reading →
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Microsoft buys corp.com so bad guys can’t
In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million . Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other…
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FBI, DHS, HHS Warn of Imminent Ransomware Threat Against U.S. Hospitals
On Monday, Oct. 26, KrebsOnSecurity began following up on a tip from a reliable source that an aggressive Russian cybercriminal gang known for deploying ransomware was preparing to disrupt information technology systems at hundreds of hospitals, clinics and medical care facilities across the United States. Today…
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Zsh and Fish’s simple but clever trick for highlighting missing linefeeds
tl;dr: We look at how Zsh and Fish is able to indicate a missing terminating linefeed in program output when the Unix programming model precludes examining the output itself.
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How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant
Within two emails, a merchant went from blatant dismissal to full payment, and I owe it to The Organized Professional Method.
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Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.
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Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming
Probability problems come up a lot in systems programming, and I’m using that term loosely to mean everything from operating systems programming and networking, to building large online services, to creating virtual worlds like in games. Here’s a bunch of rough-and-ready probability rules of thumb that are deeply…
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Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.
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Rediscovering the Small Web
Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is…
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How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
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Bloom filters debunked: Dispelling 30 Years of bad math with Coq
There's this rather nifty feature of modern web browsers (such as Firefox or Chrome ) where the browser will automatically warn the user if they happen to navigate to a " malicious " URL:
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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story
Unprecedented efforts to squelch information about a New York Post story may prove to be more dangerous corruption than whatever Hunter Biden did with a crooked Ukrainian energy company
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Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …
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Please stop recommending Gitflow
Git-flow is a branching and merging methodology popularized by this blog post, entitled “A Successful Git branching model”. In the last ten years, countless teams have been snookered by…
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Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious
I've recently seen lots of people tweeting this supposed newspaper clipping. An olde-timey warning about wearing flu masks. But is it too good to be true? The first thing to do with any image of a text quote is to search for the text. Look, I'm not saying tumblr isn't great, but… I wouldn't exactly trust it as a…
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Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary
In my day job I work as a consultant. Roughly six months ago my current client had a non-negotiable requirement that consultants are not all...
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On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services
I’ve often said that if we convince ourselves that technology is magic, we risk becoming hostages to it . Just recently, I had a brush with this fate, but happily, I was saved by open source.
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How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People
More people are online than ever before. More people are desperate than ever before. Learn how to use that 👇
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I trick my well-developed procrastination skills
It took me 10 years to finish my PhD, so I would assume my procrastination skills are not that bad ;) … fortunately, nowadays, I use some basic rules to fight procrastination and have become quite efficient with it. The following three basic rules helped me a lot to organize myself.
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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What Will Happen in the 2020s
It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bill Gates, is that people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade. This is an important decade for mankind. It is a decade in which we will […]