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Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer
One of the best things about modern cryptography is the beautiful terminology. You could start any number of punk bands (or Tumblrs) named after cryptography terms like ‘hard-core predicate&#…
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An Experimental New Type Inference Scheme for Rust
While on vacation, I’ve been working on an alternate type inference scheme for rustc. (Actually, I got it 99% working on the plane, and have been slowly poking at it ever since.) This scheme simplifies the code of the type inferencer dramatically and (I think) helps to meet our intutions (as I will explain). It is…
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GitHub dropped Pygments
My first-ever open source contribution, a couple years ago, was to a project called Pygments. My motivation? GitHub was displaying Racket source code poorly. Pygments didn't have a Racket lexer. GitHub was using a Scheme lexer for Racket code. The Scheme ...
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TechCrunch covered Vic Gundotra's departure badly
Mad rantings from a computer guy. My thoughts are my own, and don't represent my current or past employers.
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Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science
It's always very tricky when people who aren't educators start banging on about what should or shouldn't be taught in schools. My own school days are but a hazy memory of hormones, angst, and boring homework. Yet here I am, pontificating. With the current "fad" of encouraging children to learn to code, I thought I…
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How Apple Pay works and why it matters for developers
A blog for third-party developers on the Clover POS platform.
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Elsevier journals – some facts
Update: figures now in from Imperial. See below. Further update: figures in from Nottingham too. Further update: figures now in from Oxford. Final update: figures in from LSE. A little over two yea…
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Handbrake 0.10.0 released
News and Project Updates!
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How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
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What I've Learned From Female Founders So Far
On the whole, I got a great response to my request for feedback about how YC could encourage female founders. It's clear there are two separate problems: 1) Some women already starting startups...
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Why your first Rust FizzBuzz implementation may not work
An exploration into some initially surprising but great parts of Rust (though you still may not like them).
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Intel Bringing SIMD to JavaScript
Access technologies from partnerships with the community and leaders. Everything open source at Intel. We have a lot to share and a lot to learn.
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How to steal Bitcoins that are protected by weak passphrases
Every Bitcoin address is based on a secret key, from which the public key (associated to a Bitcoin address) is calculated. Once you have the private key for an address, you have the control of that address and can use it to transfer funds.
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Ikea C&D's 8-year old Ikea furniture hacking website
Updated 19 June: Read latest development (New talks). I am afraid I have a bit of bad news. Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that
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Stripe – Apple Pay
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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We’re 10 today
On our tenth birthday we can look back on a year in which our free and open world map has gone from strength to strength, being deployed by large companies such as Apple, Mapquest and Foursquare, and relief organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the American Red Cross.