Analyzing One Million Robots.txt Files
Insights gathered from analyzing the robots.txt files of Alexa's top one million domains.
Phoenix WebSockets under a Microscope
This is a code-reading and exploration post about the WebSockets side of Phoenix. It builds upon some of the tracing techniques showcased in the previous post, to observe some of the internals of Phoenix. It also features some tricks I commonly employ to debug WebSocket related issues. The title and nature of this…
CHIP-8 in Common Lisp
In the previous post we looked at how to emulate a CHIP-8 CPU with Common Lisp. But a CPU alone isn't much fun to play, so in this post we'll add a screen to the emulator with Qt .
Learn React with Copywork
Tired of making TODO apps over and over? Try this instead.
House Schedules Vote on Eliminating Consumer Online Privacy Rights Next Week
Majority Leader McCarthy Confirms House to Immediately Act on Behalf of the Cable and Telephone Industry Following the Senate Vote Yesterday, the U.S. Senate by a razor thin margin of 50 to 48 voted to take away the privacy rights of Internet users as a favor to the cable and telephone industry....
On Disk IO, Part 3: LSM Trees
If you like the series, check out my book on Database Internals!
Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
Here at Mozilla, we’re extremely excited about next month’s release of Firefox Quantum, with massive speed improvements, a brand new UI, and many Developer Tools upgrades -- available now in ...
Text Is Keeping Kids from Coding
We ran into a big blocker when designing SpriteBox Coding, a learn-to-code game for kids ages 5+. For some kids, code was simply…
Testing Cliqz in Firefox
About a year ago, Mozilla announced a strategic investment in Cliqz GmbH, the Munich, Germany-based provider of search and privacy tools. Today, we want to tell you about an important ...
Why Choose Vue.js
In the past five years or so, while the web development world was going mad with the JavaScript revolution – I stayed mostly indifferent, occupying myself with backend work and distracting myself with things like Kubernetes .
Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
Don't publicly expose .git (2015)
Sebastian participated in a CTF (capture the flag) a couple of months ago. One challenge he faced was the task of restoring a git repository from a …
A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid
In the last few months I taught three graduate mini-courses about string diagrams and graphical linear algebra – at Phd Open in Warsaw, a winter school in Estonia, and a graduate school in Le…
Swagger is now the OpenAPI Specification
A while back I wrote an OSS Spotlight post about the Swagger project. In short, Swagger is “the world’s most popular API tooling”. It’s a powerful open source framework back…
The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords
Yesterday I had a bunch of people point me at a tweet from a politician in the UK named Nadine Dorries [https://twitter.com/NadineDorries]. As it turns out, some folks were rather alarmed about her position on sharing what we would normally consider to be a secret. In this
Securing your API: a modern alternative to CSRF tokens
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) allows an attacker to make unauthorized requests on behalf of a user. We tackle CSRFs while allowing a subset of Cross-Origin requests.
6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
Working remotely is a mixed bag. There are a lot of positives... and some negatives. If you’re a remote employee (or considering a remote job), here are my top ten tips that I’ve gleaned in the last six months.
Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Today marks a milestone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the addition of a new architecture to our list of fully supported platforms. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM is a part of our multi-architecture strategy and the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with the upstream community and our silicon and hardware…
Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts
Vintage computers and retro gaming
An Open Letter from Freelancers at Nautilus Magazine
December 13, 2017 Dear Readers, Funders and Board Members of Nautilus Magazine, As of December 13, we are writers and editors awaiting payment from Nautilus magazine for a collective debt totalling $50,000. Some of us have been waiting to be paid for more than a year. Our numbers span many time zones, from
Why does Sattolo's algorithm produce a permutation with exactly one cycle?
I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every…