Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,204 posts.
I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding…
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage…
Blog post — USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
It appears that most of the old iOS conceptual documents have been moved to the documentation archive and are now unsupported.
risk visualize deez nuts
Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses. ... HTML, CSS and our vanishing…
Preamble# The internet is the bane of my existence. Ads, distractions, sponsored content, bad news, bad ideas, more ads, social media, antisocial media, even more ads. Also, I’m a software developer, so the internet is basically indispensable for me, a central pillar of my income and a convenient way to communicate…
Finding the median in a list seems like a trivial problem, but doing so in linear time turns out to be tricky. In this post I’m going to walk through one of my favorite algorithms, the median-of-medians approach to find the median of a list in deterministic linear time. Although proving that this algorithm runs in…
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I…
This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…
I ran out of characters for microblogging so this is where the big words go
it's not working
But the latest revelations scare me. It's one thing to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software; there's a lot of software out there which was written by developers with very little understanding of cryptography or software security, and it shows. If you care about security, we reasoned, stick to software written…
How I built a transit dashboard with Rust, Skia, and an old Kindle
I have held back on writing anything about AI or how we (not) use AI for development in the curl factory. Now I can't hold back anymore. Let me show you the most significant effect of AI on curl as of today - with examples. Bug Bounty Having a bug bounty means that we offer … Continue reading The I in LLM stands for…
Exploiting a Video Camera's Rolling Shutter to Recover Secret Keys from Devices Using Video Footage of Their Power LED
Finding Google Meet phone numbers and bruteforcing PINs to join random meetings
Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…
$100,500 Apple Bug Bounty for hacking the webcam via a Safari Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) bug. CVE-2021-30861, CVE-2021-30975
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
