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Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,874 posts.
14762
The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
14763
How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law"
Right, here's another thing I am getting off my chest - email letter to OFAC (edited slightly from version sent). Dear OFAC This corresp...
14764
Visiting Chelsea Manning in prison
On the day that I am scheduled to see my friend Chelsea for the first time in six years, I wake up at 4:51pm to a shrieking fire alarm in my hotel room. Semi-conscious and disoriented, I leap out of bed and spin around wildly grabbing at all the things I care about – my phone and passport, the precious slip of paper…
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50 CVEs in 50 Days: Fuzzing Adobe Reader
Research By: Yoav Alon, Netanel Ben-Simon Introduction The year 2017 was an inflection point in the vulnerability landscape. The number of new vulnerabilities reported that year was around 14,000, which is over twice the number from the year before (see table below). The probable reason for this is the increased…
14767
Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code
Winamp builds tools that empower artists to manage their music and revenue, while delivering a player that offers a seamless listening experience. Discover our products!
14768
Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
14769
Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job
I have long been a fan of Wired's coverage of privacy and security issues, particularly the insightful reporting and analysis by Ryan Singel...
14770
The Sound of Silence
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too...
14771
Lessons Learned from Writing Over 300k Lines of Infrastructure Code
Infrastructure code lessons from a HashiConf 2018 talk by Gruntwork, with the video, the slides, and a condensed written version of five key takeaways.
14772
Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Down to Users and Misses the Point
Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (paywalled, but summarized here) relies on all-too-familiar refrains to explain the dubious principles and so-called “facts” behind Facebook’s business model. It’s the same old song we’ve heard before. And, as usual, it wildly misses users’...
14773
Serving my blog posts as Linux manual pages
Intended audience: You are likely to enjoy this post the most if you are interested in Linux and/or Linux manual pages, or if you enjoy reading about esoteric programming projects.
14774
Anti-patterns in software blogging
Effective writing for software developers
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What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
14777
Build Tools – Make, no more
Hadi Hariri Blog
14778
Up to $41B in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds
Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is not being properly tracked due to poor record-keeping practices, reveals a new Oxfam report published today ahead of the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington D.C.
14779
Seeing through hardware counters: A journey to 3x performance increase
By Vadim Filanovsky and Harshad Sane
14780
Chrome OS is here to stay
We’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both Android and Chrome OS, but there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS.
14781
Using Dark Mode in CSS with MacOS Mojave
Paul Miller. I make projects which help developers to build awesome things
14782
My Call to Senator Schumer’s Office on PIPA: It’s So Much Worse Than I Thought
First, let me say how fantastic it is that when you call the office, a real-live human picks up the phone and can speak to you. There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this.
14783
The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
14784
How a Diode Changed My Life
When you are a child, everything seems fascinating, almost everything is magical because you don't know the boundaries of what you have to discover yet.
14785
Internet Search Tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
14786
Debian celebrates 30 years
Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release". He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian...
14787
Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality
Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) is always exploring new optical architectures to improve form factor, comfort, and optical performance. Last fall,...
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Toward a Reasonably Secure Laptop
It’s no secret that hardware selection is one of the biggest hurdles Qubes users face. Finding a computer that is secure, trustworthy, and compatible is more difficult than it should be. In an effort to address the compatibility aspect of that problem, we introduced the Qubes-certified ...
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MP3 for Image Compression (2006)
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…