There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
Many shell users, and certainly most of the people working in computer forensics or other fields of information security, have a habit of ru...
I remember fondly two years ago, when 2-Factor-Authentication (2FA) became popular and well used across major web applications (Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others). I found, my naive sixteen year old self unable to come to terms for why the genius idea had not been thought of before. At
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t e…
I used to ask interviewees, “What’s your favorite programming language?” The answer was nearly always, “I just choose the right language for the job.” Duh. Does anyone ever deliberately pick the wrong language? This was clearly a way to avoid actually naming a language for fear of picking one I didn’t like.
A handful of Brooklyn Law students forced a patent troll to drop a meritless lawsuit.
A non-artsy primer in digital aesthetics
Hacker Experience is an online hacking simulation game. Read more about it here.
Welcome to The Nor, a series of essays by James Bridle commissioned by the Hayward Gallery in 2014/5. In order, the essays are: All Cameras Are Police Cameras , Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum , and Low Latency , as well as an Epilogue . These are accompanied by photographs and a map , and additional content…
Fitting as much Stack Overflow as possible into 4096 bytes
An updated report on my experience with Rust and where I think it might be going.
This article attempts to give a sort of ‘orientation tour’ for people whose previous programming background is in high (ish) level languages such as Java or Python, and who now find that they need or want to learn C.
This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.
Read this article to discover how chess is used to teach people how to think. "It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at."
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.
Another great post
Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment , and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Microsoft, Lenovo, and any number of Lenovo’s business partners intended for it to have. Now all you need is an SSH client so…
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financial…
