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LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,204 posts.
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Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015
As you may have already seen, Mozilla is not in the list of organizations accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015.People who have observed the list carefully may have noticed that
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Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image
As a follow-up to the similar milestone reached for our WSL image a few months ago, I’m happy to share that Arch Linux now has a bit-for-bit reproducible Docker image! This bit-for-bit reproducible image is distributed under a new “repro” tag. The reason for this is due to one noticeable caveat: to ensure…
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Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco
Update, 14 Feb 2014: A year and a half on from writing this, Tesco has indeed suffered a serious security incident almost certainly as a result of some of the risks originally detailed here. Read more about it in The Tesco hack – here’s how it (probably) happened [https://www.
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Zenreader: A 4.7" E-Ink RSS Reader
I have been long wanting a PDA of sorts with an E-Ink screen that allows me to read stuff on the Internet without eye strains. But the Kindle really sucks as a newsreader device because the experimental browser never works correctly.
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Migrating from Google Analytics
In this post we'll explore what happened when I migrated away from Google Analytics (GA) to a self-hosted solution. The tool that I migrated to is an open-source platform called Countly . It offers a subset of features from what GA offers.
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Go Slices Are Fat Pointers
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
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Technical, cognitive, and intent debt
three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code
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Playing battleships over BGP
BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the ISP to ISP interactions and is now a very fundemental part of the internet.
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Learning from 20 years of personal analytics
Utilizing data analysis capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, Stephen Wolfram looks at his quantified self based on his large collection of lifelogging data.
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Automatic supercuts on the command line with Videogrep
I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep , my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on…
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A determined 'hacker' decrypts RDS-TMC
RDS-TMC uses an encryption algorithm simple enough to be run using pen-and-paper hardware.
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Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
On my Introduction to A* page I cover the basics of the A* graph search algorithm for finding shortest paths. Here’s an example from the town of Denerim in Dragon Age Origins. Try moving the start and goal to see A* in action:
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Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python
Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it’s a command-line “supercut” generator. The code is here on github .
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Making a font
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum . Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on…
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I'm not worried about AI job loss
We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
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Names should be cute, not descriptive
A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and…
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Will Linux phones stay around this time?
While working through the old posts in order to adjust the front matter (and sometimes more), I thought: Will this last? Or will this go south soon, like it did around with previous projects again? A recent reddit post reinforced this line of thought, so I decided to write down my thoughts on the issue.
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Who cares about diversity?
All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires.
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Things I Was Wrong About: Types
I have changed my mind about some topics big and small so far in my life. Today: the value of types for programming.
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San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It's impossible to argue that San Francisco hasn't changed my life dramatically. When I moved to the Bay Area four years ago, I was an inexperienced kid who was working at a Genius Bar in an Apple Store. I didn't know JavaScript at all—hell, I could barely program and my useless liberal arts degree was doing nothing…
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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free. The problem with email is …
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I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)
Back in 2007, I was searching for a software developer job at various companies. At one of these companies, the best strategy to get the job was to give a wrong answer. If this seems weird to you, let me explain what happened.
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Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people
A big nerd debate with bigger implications for the future of work, technology, and the economy
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Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
For the last few years, Microsoft has stated during event keynotes and in other places that Linux is a rapidly growing operating system (OS) being used within Microsoft Azure. They had proudly stat…
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Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail
Pat lost his seat because of an incompetent board. Let's meet them.