601
Explain like I’m 5: Kerberos (2013)
Explain like I’m 5 years old: Kerberos – what is Kerberos, and why should I care?
602
603
My Institutional Review Board Nightmare
September 2014 There’s a screening test for bipolar disorder. You ask patients a bunch of things like “Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?”. If they say ‘yesR…
604
Redoing all my home networking
How I set up my home lab to be my very own cloud.
605
Things I Wish I'd Known Before Using Vagrant
One of the ironies of working a lot with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift is that I’ve had to learn a lot about Vagrant and Virtualbox. Mostly I use it to spin up OpenShift clusters on my local machine, but I’ve had to poke into lots of corners to get various other things working too.
606
Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
Facebook gave one of the worst keynotes in a long time: there was no vision, just the adoption of Snap’s. It’s the inevitable outcome of a monopoly.
607
608
609
Hacking Voting Machines at Defcon
Let's rig some elections.
610
A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder
This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. You can find the source code here along with a test suite and benchmark:
611
About This Googler's Manifesto
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are…
612
I will not log in to your website
Two or three times a day, I get an email whose basic structure is as follows: Prof. Aaronson, given your expertise, we’d be incredibly grateful for your feedback on a paper / report / gr…
613
614
Successful Solo Founders
Note* Since publishing this, a research study came out by MIT with more information and data on this. See 2 founders are not always better…
615
616
The Uber Dilemma
Benchmark’s lawsuit against Uber is extraordinary; that is because Uber, despite everything, remains an extraordinary company. Game theory explains the implications.
617
618
Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
619
A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
620
Dynamic Progamming: First Principles
Many problems of todays world require multiple decisions made throughout the lifetime of the problem. Choices are made based upon information, including previous decisions made in the problem. This article looks at how Dynamic Programming can be applied to help solve these problems in an efficient manner.
621
622
Dear Postgres
Dear Postgres, I’ve always felt an affinity for you in my 9 years of working with you. I know others have known you longer, but that doesn’t mean they love you more. Years ago when others complained about your rigidness or that you weren’t as accommodating as others I found solace in your steadfast values: Don’t lose…
623
624
625
Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950
The shifting majorities of the sexes in the workplace.
626
Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda
If you run a small SaaS business, you need a recurring billing solution, and there are a lot of options out there. There’s Chargify (from $149/month), Chargebee (from $99/month), Recurly (from $99/month), MoonClerk (from $15/month), etc. All of these platforms have features beyond recurring payments, which increases…
627
How Rust is tested
Rust is a systems programming language with massive ambitions. It is designed for creating the most reliable software, from the tiniest embedded systems to multi-million line behemoths, and its users need to have confidence that it is fit for purpose.
628
A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode
Pixels and polygons and shaders, oh my!
629
The myth of using Scala as a better Java
When people talk about their experience with Scala, they often say that it is possible to use Scala as a better Java. And indeed, many companies, especially the ones that adopted Scala around 2008-2009, didn't want to give up the familiar tooling and simply integrated Scala into existing workflows based on Maven. At…
630