Hacking Hearthstone with machine learning – Defcon talk wrap-up
A wrap-up of my Defcon talk about hacking Hearthstone with machine learning including slides and a video.
JDK8 + Facebook React: Rendering single page apps on the server
A post by August Lilleaas, published March 20, 2014.
We Need Viable Search Engine Competition
Why Google's monopoly on search is a growing problem, from conflicts of interest to SEO manipulation, and why we desperately need a real competitor.
Account hijacking on MtGox
If it wasn't MtGox I wouldn't even mention it — XSS/fixation/etc are web sec routines, and are not worth a blog post. But it *is* MtGox. W...
Go, REST APIs, and Pointers
One of the more interesting design challenges with go-github (and subsequently the one that results in the most questions) is the use of pointers for most all of the fields in our structs that are marshaled and passed to the GitHub API. After a fair amount of trial and error, I settled on the approach that I’m going…
Life of an HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server
When learning a new programming language, I tend to write two things with it: a language interpreter (usually a FORTH-like language or Brainfuck if I'm feeling lazy), and a HTTP server. Sometimes, just as a challenge or a way to quench my boredom, I do this even though I've been working with a particular language for…
Preventing heartbleed bugs with safe programming languages
The Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL has resulted in a fair amount of damage across the internet. The bug itself was quite simple and is a textbook case for why programming in unsafe languages like C can be problematic. As an experiment to see if a safer systems programming language could have prevented the bug I tried…
Google Search/Web history disable does nothing for privacy
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users. It’s not exactly the most advertised feature (you won’t find it in your profile page) to begin with, but once you do find it (it’s on the history page, you have…
The origin of “log in” (2011)
We do it dozens of times a day, every day, but why do we call it logging in? “Log in” is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online li…
AIs are now re-writing history
Dr Robert Smith is a technologist, complexity scientist, entrepreneur, writer and sought-after public speaker. He is an artificial intelligence (A.I.) expert and has worked with clients, companies and institutions across the private and public sectors. Having grown up in Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights…
Starting data analysis with R: Things I wish I'd been told
R is a very powerful open source environment for data analysis, statistics and graphing, with thousands of packages available. After my previous blog post about likert-scales and metadata in R , a few of my colleagues mentioned that they were learning R through a Coursera course on data analysis . I have been working…
Go’s runtime C to Go rewrite, by the numbers
The start of September brings a close to the Go 1.4 merge window . From now until the release in December, only bug fixes and tweaks will be accepted.
Thoughts on Martini – Introducing Negroni
Originally published on CodeGangsta on May 19, 2014. Restored here to preserve the legacy Martini/Golang archive. It’s never easy to take honest criticism, especially when the target of the criticism…