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Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light?
I should state from the very beginning that the title of this post is a bit of a tease. I don’t know why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. No one does. It is a fundamental pos…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
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Clever uses of pass, the Unix password manager
Pass ( main site , Arch wiki ) is a command-line Unix password manager that utilizes GPG for all underlying encryption. However, beyond passwords, we can utilize it in a number of clever ways.
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Why Retaining Walls Collapse
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]
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Google suffers from a digital petro curse
The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the…
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Container networking is simple (2020)
Begin with the basics to understand Docker and Kubernetes networking: learn how to create and interconnect Linux network namespaces using only command-line tools.
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The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
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Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation
Several years ago I actually cared about the differences between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Namely, that Terraform did not provide…
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Why Emacs: Redux
redux adjective brought back; resurgent: the Victorian era redux.
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Tracking One Year of Malicious Tor Exit Relay Activities (Part II)
>25% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users
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The Problem with Gradle
Or: How to Remain Sane when Approaching Gradle (with apologies to Hans Dockter).
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My Favorite One Liners
My favorite Linux command-line one-liners: turn shell output into an image, find your biggest directories, list your most-used commands, serve files over HTTP.
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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
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Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?
A guest post on Georgism by Lars Doucet
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The Overview Effect – William Shatner's Words After Returning from Space
William Shatner's profound words about his experience in space after returning on Blue Origin NS-18:
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The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
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Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some
Published: 10-07-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Suck It, Wall Street
In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker
1103
Extracting Objects Recursively with Jq
The Algolia-powered Hacker News API returns nested comment threads that look like this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108
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ProPublica's tax story
What happens when journalists don't have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?
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Chrome may start restricting requests to private networks
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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The Fourier transform is a neural network
The site of Sid
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Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
TLDR: “make the web do apps” is not a disruptive strategy. It's like surviving The Great Oxidation Event, then saying “make anaerobes do photosynthesis”. Ok, but the blue-green algae got there first, so photosynthesis is no longer asymmetric. It is symmetric competition.
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The Modern Java Platform – 2021 Edition
Many developers were burned by the overly complex world of Java back in the early 2000s. The Gang of Four patterns and middleware / J2EE / Java EE led to…
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99 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. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write … Continue reading →