Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,187 posts.
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…
From rate limits to no limits: How IPv6's massive address space and a crafty botguard bypass left every Google user's phone number vulnerable
Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the age of 18 (or a…
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting…
Why open source firmware is important for security.
I gave a talk at the DBX conference called The Future of Programming . Below are links and quotes from some primary sources I used, as well as links to wikipedia and elsewhere where you can learn more.
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization [1] . Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean…
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
Better design for Github repository page
I was debugging my WiFi settings this week when I noticed something strange. WiFi Analyzer was showing two hidden networks coming from my router, one for each frequency: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Networks which I haven't configured and didn't appear in my router's admin interface. WTF?
every time i do, i feel bad for the poor person having to use it (especially if that person is me!). a plain list of bytes makes it hard to notice interesting things in the data. go ahead, try to find the single c0 in these bytes:
Update 5/29: Mullvad has begun rolling out a mitigation feature on their servers that scrambles exit IP positions, thereby fixing this issue. IPs are still deterministically selected based on the pubkey. Mullvad is one of the few VPN providers that offers multiple exit IPs for its servers. If two people connect to the…
The Art of Game Feel (a.k.a Juice) in Product Design
Here in the northern hemisphere the vernal equinox just passed and the days arequickly getting longer. One of my col...
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
The story behind writing The BEAM Book-ten years, three publishers, and an open‑source sprint.
I rebuilt our interactive mapping stack with open source technology
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
Texts on this and that.
The uncanny valley of LLMs' prose
This is now a thing! Here is the follow-up post, containing the details. Join the Kickstarter here! Even better news, this is now not just a thing, but an actual physical product! Please check out LidLayer.com Preface I’ve always liked the idea of putting stickers on my MacBook Pro, but have always avoided it for two…
I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is
