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Iran’s exceptional reaction to 9/11 attacks (2015)
“Iran’s sympathetic response to the American tragedy has been exceptional for a country under US economic siege for two decades. Only hours after the Sept. 11 attack, President Muhammad…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,307 posts.
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Why I close pull requests
I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs. A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are…
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 8: it boots
We've been restoring a Xerox Alto from the 1970s for several months, and we finally got it to boot and run some programs! There's still so...
576
Statistical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
You can get CS papers published with shoddy statistics, but that doesn’t mean you should. Here are three easy ways to bungle the data analysis in your evaluation section: don’t even try to use statistics when you really ought to; misinterpret an inconclusive statistical test as concluding a negative; or run too many…
577
ECDSA smartphone key extraction using $2 magnetic probe
We show that modern cryptographic software on mobile phones, implementing the ECDSA digital signature algorithm, may inadvertently expose its secret keys through physical side channels: electromagnetic radiation and power consumption which fluctuate in a way that depends on secret information during the cryptographic…
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Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently
Answer to the famous question ‘Do good programmers use Google?’
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Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry
There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub [https://web.archive.org/web/20181007100235/https://sci-hub.cc/]. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in
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Micropackages and Open Source Trust Scaling
Some thoughts about why npm style micro-packages are a huge liability for everybody and what we could do to make them work.
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One year later
A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.
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Let's Encrypt and Nginx – State of the art secure web deployment
An overview of a secure web deployment with Let's Encrypt and Nginx. How to set up a valid HTTPS connection, harden it and get top security ratings.
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No More Full Table Vacuums in PostgreSQL
I just committed a very important patch to PostgreSQL. The short summary for the patch is " Don't vacuum all-frozen pages. " and it follows...
586
Why I don't like smartphones
They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption. In this regard they differ critically from PCs, because PCs are equal devices in the sense that the same device is used for creation and consumption. This means that anyone with a PC can create as well as consume, if they so wish. This…
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DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
588
Git Undo
Tell me if you recognize this scenario: you’re in the middle of rewriting your local commits when you suddenly realize that you have gone too far and, after one too many rebases, you are left with a history that looks nothing like the way you wanted. No? Well, I certainly do. It was in one of those moments of despair…
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Baby Steps: Slowly Porting Musl to Rust
ramblings by Adam Perry
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Unix’s file durability problem
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…
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Programming blogs
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So…
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FBI Harassment
Obligatory Disclaimer: Personal or political views presented within this post absolutely do not reflect those of my employer(s), client(s), and/or legal counsel.
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SSH: Best practices
The comments around the last OpenSSH issue ( CVE 2016-0777 , you must read excellent Qualys’ analysis if you’re interested with the details), I noticed that many people were not aware of some basic features of OpenSSH. I will attempt to give a few advises, prioritized in feasibility order, and with graphical…
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Dropbox as a Git Server
git-remote-dropbox is now on PyPI!
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The Deletion of gcj
I originally posted this on G+ but I thought maybe I should expand it a little and archive it here.
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Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014)
I've just read " The Low Quality of Scientific Code ", which claims that code written by scientists comes out worse than it would if "software engineers" were involved.