3391
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
3392
0.4.1: Introducing Parse
One of the greatest feature of the Rebol language has always been its parsing engine, simply called Parse. It is an amazing piece of des...
3393
Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
The rain started in August and by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had damaged the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s
3394
Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…
3395
From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
3396
Proof of Stake: How I Learned to Love Weak Subjectivity
<p>Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits,...
3397
The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons
Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox ...
3398
Quote Origin: Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times
Question for Quote Investigator : There is a great quote by Plato or Socrates about the misbehavior of children in antiquity that I read in the New York Times. The quote shows that the problems between generations are not just a recent occurrence. Instead, the conflicts between parents and offspring are timeless: 1
3399
Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever
So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and…
3400
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
3401
Understanding Container Reuse in AWS Lambda
Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda AWS Lambda functions execute in a container (sandbox) that isolates them from other functions and provides the resources, such as memory, specified in the function’s configuration. In this article we discuss how Lambda creates and reuses these sandboxes, and the impact of those policies on the…
3402
The CA's Role in Fighting Phishing and Malware
Since we announced Let’s Encrypt we’ve often been asked how we’ll ensure that we don’t issue certificates for phishing and malware sites. The concern most commonly expressed is that having valid HTTPS certificates helps these sites look more legitimate, making people more likely to trust them. Deciding what to do here…
3403
Radicalizing the Romanceless
[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…
3404
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ
Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of…
3405
Data Backup Strategies: Why the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is the Best
A Backblaze survey found 54% of people know someone who’s lost data. Learn how the 3-2-1 backup rule can help prevent data loss and keep your files secure.
3406
Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
3407
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
3408
Introducing Buffer's Salary Calculator & New Salary Formula
We’re sharing a new version of Buffer's transparent salary formula, and a web app that anyone can use to find out what you might make on the team at Buffer.
3409
Chapter 1: Beliefs About Sharia
According to the survey findings, most Muslims believe sharia is the revealed word of God rather than a body of law developed by men based on the word of God.…
3410
Choosing properties for property-based testing
Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use
3411
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
3412
Formal Theory of Creativity and Fun and Intrinsic Motivation Explains Science, Art, Music, Humor (Juergen Schmidhuber). Artificial Scientists, Artificial Artists, Developmental Robotics, Curiosity, Attention, Surprise, Novelty, Discovery, Open-Ended Learning, Formal Theory of Beauty, Creating Novel…
Formal Theory of Creativity & Fun & Intrinsic Motivation (1990-2010) by Jürgen Schmidhuber
3413
Elon Musk Series: Introduction
A post about how Elon Musk became the real world Iron Man.
3414
Cap'n Proto: Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, and SBE
Update Jun 18, 2014: I have made some corrections since the original version of this post.
3415
Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave
Over their lifetime, battery electric vehicles produce far less global warming pollution than their gasoline counterparts—and they’re getting cleaner.
3416
ImperialViolet
Thomas Ptacek laid out a number of arguments against DNSSEC recently (and in a follow up ). We don't fully agree on everything, but it did prompt me to write why, even if you assume DNSSEC, DANE (the standard for speaking about the intersection of TLS and DNSSEC) is not a foregone conclusion in web browsers.
3417
Falling Into The Pit of Success
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen
3418
The Shareholder Value Myth
Shareholder-value thinking dominates the business world today. Professors, policymakers, and business leaders routinely chant the mantras that public ...
3419
Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and Software License FAQ
A: To answer common questions about the Debian Free Software Guidelines and how we judge whether some piece of software is free.
3420
How the new Gmail image proxy works and what this means for you
Google recently announced that images in emails will be displayed automatically by default to Gmail users, thanks to an anonymizing proxy operated by them.