Are Your Devices Hardwired for Betrayal?
It's an interesting time to be a computer security researcher. Last week, Kaspersky Lab released a report about a new family of malware from an entity they called "The Equation Group". The report demonstrated for the first time that firmware-based attacks, previously only demonstrated in lab...
The tech arms race in AAA games and why I'm abandoning it
A blog about video game development
What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?
[Epistemic status: Speculative. I can’t make this post less condescending and elitist, so if you don’t like condescending elitist things, this might not be for you.] Developmental psych…
The Universal Data Structure
Whether you write compilers, web services or Django admin panels, you probably use hash maps more than all other data structures combined. In fact, you may not remember the last time you used anything else. This is not a coincidence: any conceivable data structure can be implemented with a hash map; therefore, there…
What Makes Founders Succeed
I recently dug up my introduction to Founders at Work, which I wrote in 2006, and I was amazed how accurate it still seems: –––––– Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at...
Deku: How we built our functional alternative to React
Explore technical topics, solutions, and resources for building with Twilio – and beyond.
Final update on the JetBrains Toolbox announcement
Hello, tl;dr We are moving forward with subscriptions with important adjustments. You will receive a perpetual fallback license once you pay for a year up front or 12 consecutive months. You wi
Africa's Worst New Internet Censorship Law Could Be Coming to South Africa
Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation...
Reverse engineering an ancient wireless security keypad using RTL-SDR
A few weeks ago, some friends and I decided that our houses weren’t crammed full enough with useless crap and so we embarked on a journey to a large junk shop surplus warehouse. The place was a vast hangar brimming with old and curious pieces of technology ranging from IBM keyboards to VHS video editing …
De-Obfuscating the Statistics of Mass Shootings
After the horrifying killings at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama once more had to speak publicly about a mass shooting.
If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice
I assumed this was probably due to some shutdown corruption (though I rarely hit those in OS X). It just wouldn’t come back up and showed me some font error
Reasons to love SQLAlchemy
I've seen some bashing of ORMs of late, which I think is totally undeserved. I'm a big fan of SQLAlchemy ; I use it in most of my projects, and have contributed code to the library. I'm going to explain 10 good reasons you should love SQLAlchemy too! In fairness, there are a number of good ORMs around, and most of…
Bringing Asm.js to Chakra and Microsoft Edge
A couple of months back, we announced that we had started development on Asm.js. Support for Asm.js has been one of the top 10 most-requested items at the Microsoft Edge Developer Suggestion Box on UserVoice since we launched it in December 2014. Since that time, we’ve made good progress, and in Windows 10 Insider…
Google voice search: faster and more accurate
Posted by Haşim Sak, Andrew Senior, Kanishka Rao, Françoise Beaufays and Johan Schalkwyk – Google Speech TeamBack in 2012, we announced that Google...
Add a dirt-cheap screen to the Raspberry Pi B+
Recently the internet noticed the Raspberry Pi could drive LCD panels using DPI. This allows very inexpensive displays to be used with basically no additional hardware. In this post we dive into the hardware required, the software configuration, how to read screen datasheets, and basic troubleshooting.
Animated SVG vs. GIF
— The personal website of Sara Soueidan, inclusive Web UI engineer
Introducing Incremental
I’m pleased to announce the release of Incremental (well commented mli here), a powerful library for building self-adjusting computations, i.e., computations...
We Looked for Work as a Software Development Team
Part of this story is a common one. Established company in an industry undergoing major disruption hires developers to innovate back to viability. Management lacks clear vision of what that means and so chops and changes ( not pivots, that’s something else) technology strategy several times. After two years of hard…