Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,223 posts.
IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
Nobody expects CDATA sections in XML
I made a very explicit, pragmatic design decision with afl-fuzz : for performance and reliability reasons, I did not want to get into stati...
Fsyncgate: Errors on fsync are unrecoverable (2018)
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
Spaced repetition for study and learning
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
Twitter’s Shit Sandwich
On Twitter’s just-annoucned pan to require third-party clients to use OAuth.
You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code
On how the law was taken away from the people of Washington, DC by legal shenanigans
When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?
It’d be difficult to argue against the fact that The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was. Even just a quick glance at the IMDb ratings is enough to see that the show is routinely not hitting the highs it did so regularly in the earlier seasons. I’d suggest...
Lisping at JPL Revisited
It has been over 20 years since I wrote " Lisping at JPL ", half memoir and half geeky screed (and all of it half-baked) about how an obscur...
The billionaire’s typewriter
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Let's Talk About Beacons
Let's Talk About Beacons If you’ve been following the tech scene lately, you may have heard a thing or two about “Beacons”. What are Beacons? Beacons are hardware devices emitting a unique signature...
Smuggling USB Sticks
"This Is Not A Film" by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest in his country for alleged “propaganda against the regime,” will be screened under the Free Jafar Panahi Program of the 13th Cinemanila. The film was smuggled from Iran in a Flash-Drive hidden inside a cake to Cannes for screening a few…
Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
SMS phishers harvested phone numbers, shipment data from UPS tracking tool
The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details…
Test-driven development with an LLM for fun and profit
Welcome to the very first post in a new blog! Here I will discuss software development, SRE work, and other fun stuff. Sometimes an idea is just too good to pass up. I hope this blog will motivate me to turn sparks and little pieces into general knowledge in writing the words down. The other day I was discussing Tabby…
The Tyranny of the Extroverts
Society rewards extroverts. They get the job, the money, the girl (or boy), and the front page. Fortune 500 companies are run by 499 extroverts, plus Bill Gates. There are 435 extroverts in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, two from each state. In fact, the only introvert in the District of Columbia…
Private spies hired by FBI and corporations infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp
Leading “threat intelligence” firms are creating fake online personas to gain access to every corner of the web.
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
Curl is just the hobby
Jan Gampe took things to the next level by actually making this cross-stitch out of the pattern I previously posted online. The flowers really gave it an extra level of charm I think. As a cross-stitch As a pillow This quote is from a comment by an upset user on my blog, replying to one … Continue reading curl is just…
How we crowdfunded $750k for a giant book about keyboard history
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
Stories and Tips: Interviews with Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Others
Many of my students have been asking questions lately about how to do technical interviews, so I've decided to write about my interviewing experiences. I will start by giving a number of anecdotes because they're interesting to everyone, but the later parts of this post are mainly targeted at prospective students who…
My sourdough starter has twins
A couple of years ago, I participated in a study of the HealthFerm Citizen Science group in …