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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
2192
Bringing Blogging to the Fediverse
After much trial and error, I've finished basic #ActivityPub support on Write.as! (Though it's not live yet. Create a federated blog here...
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F-Secure Anti-Virus: Remote Code Execution via Solid RAR Unpacking
Blog about anti-virus software vulnerabilities.
2195
Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
2196
An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end (2011)
Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March & 9 April 2016, and 28 December 2023. The…
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Ursula K. Le Guin on “Spare Time”
In praise of the mundane, unquantifiable, impractical activities that feed creative work and fill life with meaning.
2199
A Gentle Introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (2012)
Applying probabilistic models to data usually involves integrating a complex, multi-dimensional probability distribution. For example, calculating the expectation/mean of a model distribution invol…
2200
Learning Bluetooth Hackery with BLE CTF
Do you want to get into tinkering and hacking Bluetooth LE devices? Up until now, doing so was very much a DIY process. You would h...
2201
The MacBook Air: A Decade’s Worth of Legacy
A decade ago, we entered the current era of notebook design when Steve Jobs pulled the future out of an envelope.
2202
Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests
Update: This post received quite a lot of healthy discussion on Hacker News. You can follow that conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18119570
2203
A Few Thoughts on Ray Ozzie’s “Clear” Proposal
Yesterday I happened upon a Wired piece by Steven Levy that covers Ray Ozzie’s proposal for “CLEAR”. I’m quoted at the end of the piece (saying nothing much), so I knew the piece was coming. …
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Securing your users' authentication
A few days ago, I saw an article about someone’s Playstation Network account getting stolen . The problem wasn’t so much that the account got stolen, as this apparently happens more often than not, but that Sony has created a system so convoluted that it’s possible for the thief to keep your account, without you…
2207
Android Security Auditing: Investigating Unauthorized Screenshots
About six months ago, I discovered something on my smartphone that horrified me: I went to undelete a file in DiskDigger, and I stumbled upon a plethora of unexpected jpegs: screenshots of my activity. Screenshots that I didn’t take. Screenshots of my conversations. Screenshots of my GPS position. And screenshots of…
2208
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Guide to Angel Investing
I’ve been dabbling in startup investing for a few years now. Nothing extraordinary, and I’ve definitely not made it a career, but I have developed a guide of sorts that I follow when ma…
2210
Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011)
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 1944 Simple Sabotage Field ManualA Timeless Classic Answer: Read the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. A while back I went to the inaugural meeting of a ‘commun…
2211
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Futures of distributions
Seems Debian is talking about why they are unable to package whole categories of modern software, such as anything using npm. It's good they're having a conversation about that, and I want to give a broader perspective.
2213
Pivot or Fail?
The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don’t want entrepreneurs to think that pivoting is the right thing to do when their original idea fails. It […]
2214
How to design co-programs
I recently attended the Matthias Felleisen Half-Time Show, a symposium held in Boston on 3rd November in celebration of Matthias’s 60th birthday. I was honoured to be able to give a talk ther…
2215
Jean Bourgain
I have just learned that Jean Bourgain passed away last week in Belgium, aged 64, after a prolonged battle with cancer. He and Eli Stein were the two mathematicians who most influenced my early ca…
2216
Playing with Lasp and CRDTs
For a long time I was looking for some time to play with Lasp: Lasp is a suite of libraries aimed at providing a comprehensive programming system for planetary scale Elixir and Erlang applications. Ye
2217
Putting Apple’s iMac Pro Through the Paces
At the end of December, Apple made good on the release of the new iMac Pro and started selling and shipping the new workstations. While this could be characterized as a stop-gap effort until the ne…
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Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo
Updated version If you haven’t read My Comparison Between Anki and SuperMemo, please do so. It’s not a prerequisite but if you do, you will understand the following content better.
2220
Haskell’s State monad is not a monad (2014)
Haskell’s State monad has a shameful secret. It’s not a monad [ State monads don’t respect the monad laws in Haskell, Simon Marlow ] . Look: