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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
2102
Is Catalina a Good Upgrade Yet?
Although 10.15.3 fixes a serious bug in Mail and Catalina is steadily maturing, there are many users who still shouldn’t upgrade.
2103
Why Credit Card Fraud Is Still a Thing
Most of the civilized world years ago shifted to requiring computer chips in payment cards that make it far more expensive and difficult for thieves to clone and use them for fraud. One notable exception is the United States, which is still lurching toward this goal. Here’s a look at the havoc that lag has wrought, as…
2104
The Genius of RISC-V Microprocessors
How the instruction set for RISC-V processors has been designed cleverly for both simplicity and high performance.
2105
TP-Link Archer VR1600V V2 Super User Password Cracked
Well the news is out, I won’t explain the method for reasons, but our code warriors have a new fight. After requesting the SU password, they were told flat out it doesn’t exist and refe…
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I Want Decentralized Version Control for Structured Data
How do I synchronize application data between devices and people? That's the question I was unable to answer when thinking about ideas for new applications I could develop. I wanted the synchronization to be
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J Notation as a Tool of Thought
Kenneth Iverson’s 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. He provided a number of examples ranging across linear algebra, arithmetic, probability, and logic. Unfortunately, most…
2110
Tracking systems of TV streaming devices
Watching you watch: the tracking ecosystem of over-the-top TV streaming devices, Moghaddam et al., CCS’19 The results from this paper are all too predictable: channels on Over-The-Top (OTT) s…
2111
The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
2112
Tihle: A new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
2113
Writing Grant Applications
For two years I was on the Canadian NSERC committee that reviewed individual grant applications. Fascinating. After reading dozens of applications you can begin to see patterns emerging. I’m …
2114
APIs All the Way Down
Going down the API-First Ecosystem Rabbit Hole with Shopify, Stripe, Twilio, and more
2115
A case for ending lockdown
Introduction [DISCLAIMER: The original author is a layperson without medical/scientific credentials and this post represents a best-effort attempt to synthesize relevant research and unpack the policy implications of the “lockdown” approach as compared with the proposed alternative.] [Note: See the very last section…
2116
The K-shaped recovery
This installment of The Pomp Letter is free for everyone.
2117
It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth
The President has otherworldly priorities for a potential second term, but colonizing space is a fantasy used to maintain the status quo.
2118
Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems
Posted on Wednesday 23 Sep 2020. 825 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.
2119
Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
It’s largely known that counting commits and pull requests as a measure of engineering productivity is a bad idea.
2120
Interview with Paul Graham
The fixed point of Y Combinator
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Software should be designed to last
And why I am trying to minimize my dependence on external libraries (whenever possible).
2122
The Go Compiler Needs to Be Smarter
One of my favorite languages is the Go language. I love its simplicity. It is popular and useful in a cloud setting. Many popular tools are written in Go, and for good reasons. I gave a talk on Go last year and I was asked for a criticism of Go. I do not mind that … Continue reading The Go compiler needs to be smarter
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Hundred Year Mistakes
My manager and I got off on a tangent in our most recent one-on-one on the subject of the durability of design mistakes in programming languages. A particular favourite of mine is the worst of the …
2124
The Infosec Apocalypse
The rise of tooling for vulnerability detection combined with pressure driven by Vendor Due Diligence is causing a massive enterprise freezeout for non-mainstream technologies across the board. Of particular concern is the impact this will have on the adoption of functional programming in enterprise and small business…
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Bahamas Company Registry Leaked
The people are the best thing about a life in science fiction – eclectic, bright, opinionated, talented – people like Elise Mathson: writer, jeweller, and all-round brilliant person (she's up for a Hugo this year).
2127
How x86_64 Addresses Memory
Update 2025-03-05 : @jxu has shared a collection of simplified examples that are even easier to follow than the original ones in this post.
2128
Durability: NVMe Disks
Durability is the guarantee that data can be accessed after a failure. It seems like this should be very simple: either your system provides durable data storage, or it does not. However, durability is not a binary yes/no property, and instead should be defined as the kinds of failures you want your data to survive…
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Amiga Java
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
2130
A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: Roam , a hypertext publishing platform best…