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1.5 is the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby
What's the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby? It's 1.5 for some reason. What's the reason you might ask? Read on to find out.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,218 posts.
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Mathematicians becoming data scientists
I was talking the other day with a former student at UW, Sarah Rich, who’s done degrees in both math and CS and then went off to Twitter. I asked her: so what would you say to a math Ph.D. …
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The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person
There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. It seems like a worthwhile effort that I support, even if it is also a lot of work involved and it might take some time before it reaches the state in which it can be merged. A previous … Continue reading The Gemini…
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Value is created by doing
Value is created by doing. It’s easy to forget this. A lot of stuff feels like work—commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies’ funding rounds, grabbing coffee, etc [1]—is not...
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How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, which starts at $1/month! My 🌶️ spicy take 🌶️ is that I don’t like seeing tech talks live. I get very little out of 95% of…
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The Serenity of a 5pm Bedtime
We know of tangled sleep schedules, and we have all had your struggles with them. But sometimes sleep schedules can become so twisted, that they just happen to morph into something quite ordered. The...
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A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
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A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
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DoubleClickjacking: A New type of web hacking technique
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Let's write a setjmp
Yesterday I wrote that setjmp is handy and that it would be nice to have without linking the C standard library. It’s conceptually simple, after all. Today let’s explore some differently-portable implementation possibilities with distinct trade-offs. At the very least it should illuminate why setjmp sometimes requires…
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Dinosaur and Lisp
Dinosaur is old enough, as well as Lisp, they may like each other. When I am talking about dinosaur here, I mean the dinosaur hiding in Google Chrome, it shows up when "There is no Internet connection".
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Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)
This is one in a series of papers I’m reading from OSDI and Usenix ATC. These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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APFS in Detail
Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this…
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Android Tries Harder
Google is trying very hard to get developers to build apps for Android app phones.
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Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C
UPDATED: 2025-02-15: Fixed some bugs in the examples and pointed out that you don't usually just want to panic on memory allocation failure.
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Rust and WebAssembly in 2019
Compiling Rust to WebAssembly should be the best choice for fast, reliable codefor the Web. Additionally, the same way that Rust integrates with C callingcon...
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It's hard to build an oscillator
Especially if you want it to work.
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Linux Kernel Exploitation: Attack of the Vsock
What started off as casual scrolling through the KernelCTF submissions quickly spiraled into a weeks-long deep dive into a deceptively simple patch - and my first root shell from a Linux kernel exploit!
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Making my own bed sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if
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Lessons from Spotify
Spotify has a marginal cost problem, but while the cause is unique to Spotify, the challenges are more applicable than it seems.
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The value of not getting to the point (2015)
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
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The model is the product
Old data, new models