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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,895 posts.
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Sabotage
In many places it seems to have become the norm to celebrate overwork, sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Ordinarily if you reveal that you are unhappy, unproductive and causing yourself mental and physical harm, people will be concerned and try to intervene. However, the expected response to this kind of suffering…
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Lessons Learned in Software Development
Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years: Development 1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or …
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Why is finance so complex? (2011)
Lisa Pollack at FT Alphaville mulls a question : “Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance?” The answer she comes up with is the “ Flynn Effect “, basically the idea that there is an uptrend in human intelligence. Finance, in this view, gets more complex over time because financiers get smart enough to…
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My bank has an API so I built online banking
I recently attended Mondo’s second Hackathon, and it was incredibly insightful. My first hackathon, and moreover, my first time working…
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United Airlines Bug Bounty: An experience in reporting a serious vulnerability
About six months ago, United Airlines announced their Bug Bounty program and, almost immediately, it received a ton of press. Though I initially wasn’t interested in pursuing the program (mainly due to its popularity), I decided to take a look a week or two after its launch despite being late to the party. Shortly…
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The sad state of SMTP encryption
This is a quick recap of why I’m sad about SMTP encryption. It explains how TLS certificate verification in SMTP is useless even if you force it.
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How to destroy special collections with social media
I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was in full swing, and the weather was in all its hot, glorious humidity. I…
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To defend the free web, save Mozilla
The latest version of this post, along with the blog, has moved. TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of…
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Google Photos – Can I get out?
But it begs the question: what happens with my photos once I hand them over? Should I want to move elsewhere, what are my options?
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Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
“The Carpenter” was a JavaScript programmer, well-known for a meticulous attention to detail and love for hand-crafted, exquisitely joined code. The Carpenter normally worked through personal referrals, but from time to time a recruiter would slip through his screen. One such recruiter was Bob Plissken. Bob was…
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Patronizing Passwords
Passwords suck. Let’s make them better.
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MAME and the New Emulation Reality
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m …
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Unix is not an acceptable Unix
The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?
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What you wanted to know about AI
Recently a number of famous people, including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, warned everybody about the dangers of machine intelligence. …
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I Tried VR and It Was Just OK
It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote The Road to VR, and a… few… things have happened since then. * Facebook bought Oculus for a skadillion dollars * I have to continually read thinkpieces describing how the mere act of strapping a VR headset on your face
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Supreme Commander – Graphics Study
Total Annihilation has a special place in my heart since it was the very first RTS I played; it was with Command & Conquer and …
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USB-C and Modular Smartphones Are the End-Game for Convergence
Two new technologies – the modular smartphone and USB 3.1 – are set to radically accelerate the convergence of everything to a single, in-pocket device. In fact, they are so revolutionary that they will change the entire way we think about mobile computing as the iPhone did earlier this millennium.
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Bayesian ranking of items with up and downvotes or 5 star ratings
Evan Miller wrote a great article How Not To Sort By Average Rating . He shows that simple formulas like score = upvotes - downvotes or score = upvotes / (upvotes + downvotes) don’t work. He proposes to use the lower bound of the Wilson score confidence interval. The formula is complicated and somewhat of a hack…
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Hacking Oklahoma State University's Student ID
READ THIS AFTER - a full follow up here: http://snelling.io/following-up-hacking-oklahoma-state-universitys-student-id
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Notes from Facebook's Developer Infrastructure at Scale F8 Talk
Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects. It's rare to see a company…
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Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorith...