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Write a toy strace and gdb
Being able to peek into a process is a very helpful thing when we want to fully understand how a program behaves.
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Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases
When you start out as a developer there’s an overwhelming amount of things to grasp. First there’s the language itself, then all the quirks of the specific framework you’re using,and after that (or maybe before) we’ll throw front-end development into the mix, and somewhere along the line you have to decide to store…
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The Controversial State of JavaScript Tooling
There have been many different blog posts on the “State of the Web” , problems people face around tooling, and similar-style musings of late. This article is about summarizing my thoughts on recent events. Rather than yet another rant about the state of web development, this piece aims to pour some thought into what…
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We have an epidemic of bad posture
What happens if you Google “coworking space”? You see people working hard. I see lots of necks, backs, arms, wrist and hands that will need phyiscal therapy in…
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Hard Forks
The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]
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How to allocate memory
Many programmers use malloc() and free() and pay no more mind to "allocating memory", but I often find 2-20× speed improvements by rethinking memory usage, so it is something I usually want to examine when joining a distressed project.
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My Experience With the Great Firewall of China
When I recently visited China for the first time,as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at theGreatFirewall of China with m...
1420
Is Ego-Depletion a Replicable Effect?
Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
1421
Ideas for Game Clones to Code (2012)
So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…
1422
Hotpatching a C Function on x86
In this post I’m going to do a silly, but interesting, exercise that should never be done in any program that actually matters. I’m going write a program that changes one of its function definitions while it’s actively running and using that function. Unlike last time , this won’t involve shared libraries, but it will…
1423
Amazon Dash Button's Wireless Audio Configuration
Update: I’ve learned a bit more and as such, see the bottom of the post for an update. I’ve been slow to update this but now that it’s seeming to be gaining a lot of traffic (lead…
1424
The Three Cultures of Machine Learning
Everyone should read Leo Breiman's 2001 article, Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures . (Summary: Traditional statisticians start with a distribution. They try to identify the parameters of the distribution from data that were actually generated from it. Applied statisticians start with data. They have no idea where…
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You Can't Always Hash Pointers in C
Occasionally I’ve needed to key a hash table with C pointers. I don’t care about the contents of the object itself — especially if it might change — just its pointer identity. For example, suppose I’m using null-terminated strings as keys and I know these strings will always be interned in a common table. These…
1427
Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
And I was pretty damn good at my job too.
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LL and LR Parsing Demystified (2013)
My first adventures in parsing theory came when I was doing anindependent study of programming languages in college. When I got tothe part about algorithms s...
1432
A Rebuttal for Python 3
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
1433
Jailbreak firmware turns cheap digital walkie-talkie into DMR scanning receiver
In the last years, DMR and MOTOTRBO (a.k.a. TRBO a Motorola Solutions branded DMR Radios ) has become a very popular digital voice mode on the UHF and VHF bands and the MD380 radio is the latest cheap DMR walkie-talkie to come out of China. The question is, is it any good? The longer answer is…
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The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
This post used to contain an early version of the introduction to my previous book, The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek. I’m now working on an updated iteration.
1436
Laid off (2008)
Here is my one piece of advice to you. The single most important thing to do as soon as you make it back to your house with that box full of stuff:
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uBeam's insider story by ex employee?
Today is the 6 month anniversary of my resignation from uBeam, a startup I'd spent the previous two and a half years working on. I had...
1440
StartSSL domain validation vulnerability
StartSSL certificate authority is well known for offering free domain validated SSL certificates, and also sells organisation and extended v...