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Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die
Privileged ports were a security feature in the days of dumb terminals, in the age of the World Wide Web, they are a security vulnerability.
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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For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
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Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
Chase Sunset & Vine, 2012. Painting by Alex Schaefer There is a fundamental asymmetry to banking. Banks don't like to share higher inte...
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What ever happened to Wordstar?
One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — Wordstar.
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Why you should take your 20's seriously
“Don’t take life too seriously, you’ll never get out alive.” – Van Wilder It seems like the prevailing advice today for anyone in their twenties is to live their lives…
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Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores
The US has become a hostile and authoritarian state to foreign scientists and is choosing ideology over science.
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WinGet is terrible, I want AppGet back
It’s been almost a year that Keivan Beigi shut down the AppGet project in response to shenanigans by the Windows App Model team. Microsoft…
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Why doesn't TypeScript properly type Object.keys?
A look at TypeScript’s structural type system, and we how we can effectively use it to our benefit.
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1099 will end the world in 2012
According to the Mayan calendar, the world will come to an end in 2012. Books and movies have been written about how this will happen… asteroid impact, alien invasion, hypervolcanoes, you nam…
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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
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3½ years on my custom emperor mattress – a retrospective
I made a 7'x7' mattress that I've been sleeping on since mid 2018. It's October 2021 now, so I've been sleeping in it for about three and a half years. This retrospective will cover my findings from worst to best:
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Vector graphics on GPU
Using GPU to render vector graphics.
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Arch Linux on MacBook Pro Retina 2014
[Version française] (/2015/01/arch-linux-sur-macbook-pro-retina-2014-avec-dm-crypt-lvm-et-hibernation)
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Are we at peak vector database?
Seriously - why do we need all these vector databases? Do we need dozens of them?
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We may have witnessed a NSA "Shotgiant" TAO-like action
Last Friday, the New York Times reported that the NSA has hacked/infiltrated Huawei, a big Chinese network hardware firm. We may have witne...
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Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
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You’re not writing code, you’re solving problems
If you go beyond software, and frameworks, beyond test suites and sprints and Jira tickets, you will always find a problem that needs to be solved.
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What you learn by making a new programming language
Every software engineer uses a programming language, usually multiple. Few of us make programming languages. This makes sense, because the work we need to get done can typically be done just fine in the languages that exist. Those already have people making them better. Let's focus on the task at hand.
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Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
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Gmail is killing independent email
Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...
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Python to OCaml: Retrospective
In 2013, I spent 6 months converting 0install's 29,215 lines of Python to OCaml (learning OCaml along the way). In this post, I'll describe the …