Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,219 posts.
Since I reside in a Five Eyes country (Australia) and have publicly presented four cases I led on China’s APT41 attacking organisations in ASEAN , particularly concerning China’s cyber and political strategies, I was curious to explore what China publishes about Five Eyes operations. This led me down a rabbit hole of…
Writing drafts via retrieval-augmented generation. Also reflecting on the week's journal entries.
I am reflecting here on the worst public embarrassment of my career. Two days ago I appeared live on television on ABC News Breakfast to provide comment on North Korea’s recent rocket launch, a top…
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
Faster JSON handling in a relational database.
I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves…
ILLEGAL ENGINEERING An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking. The lecture is based round a large wooden safe with a video camera inside, projecting the inside of the door mechanism on a screen. This is currently my favourite lecture to perform. There's something very satisfying about the…
How we handle 92 million compilations a year without everything catching fire
a personal blog
We published the triangulator of our map engine as earstrip, an ISC-licensed C++ and WebAssembly library. How it came to be: the ear clipper rebuilt one idea at a time and timed on 3.7 million polygons of real map data.
Extract metrics from your GoodWe solar PV system, and improve its security too
Seam carving is a technique for content-aware resizing, which changes the size of an image while attempting to preserve the interesting content of the image. The basic idea behind the technique is to remove low-energy seams: paths of pixels that are similar to their surroundings. A removed seam can be either vertical…
E ver since I released rayshader to the public, there’s been one question that comes up time and time again: “How do I use rayshader to overlay satellite imagery onto a 3D surface?” And I can see why: 3D maps with real satellite images are super cool, and there are few detailed tutorials out there on how it’s done in…
Read time: 23 minutes
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
I’ve just spent over a day, going to sleep at 1:00 am, to upgrade dependencies and fix eviction warnings in the build of a Scala project.
I fail phone screens pretty often, which limits my job prospects and is embarrassing for someone with ten years of industry experience, a pretty extensive Github account and a publicly available list of difference-making projects . 1 In theory a phone screen is supposed to evaluate whether a) this person would be good…
I have been thinking a lot lately about these two fellows. If you are not lucky enough to know them already, those are Harold and George from the Captain Underpants series of books (among others)…
A recent U.S. college degree long meant lower unemployment than the average worker. That edge flipped in 2019, and the gap is now the widest on record.
[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I'll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.] With every quarterl
Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be.
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details…
