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Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms
I have attended several Tech events where they invite so-called gurus and experts to explain the digital landscape in Africa, but I have…
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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Oops, I Wrote a C++ Compiler
TL;DR I wrote a .NET library that can compile C/C++ code into a byte code that it can also interpret. It is used in my app iCircuit to simulate Arduinos. You can use it yourself with the nuget package CLanguage.
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HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
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Postgres indexes under the hood
Many software engineers use database indexes every day, but few of us really understand how they work. In this post I’ll explain: How indexing works in Postgres using B-Trees What B-Trees are Why they are a good fit for this problem Indexes in Postgres Postgres actually offers 4 different kinds of indexes for…
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Reasoning with Types in Rust
Hi, I'm Ariel (she/her), a newly-minted member of the Swift team at Apple ! Previously, I helped lead the Luau team at Roblox where my efforts primarily focused on the design and implementation of Luau 's type system. I also led the creation of Lute to support using Luau both to build developer tooling, and as a…
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Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm? (2010)
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
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Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
Dropbear is a small and lightweight SSH server and client that can replace OpenSSH on any POSIX platform such as GNU / Linux, * BSD, Cygwin … Dropbear is free software since it is released under MIT-style licenses.
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CSS: The bad bits and how to avoid them
The more I use CSS, the more I think it’s an absolute wild wild west. It’s mature, ubiquitous, yet lacks basic, common-sense features that come as a given in other similar tools
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WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
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Never patterns, exhaustive matching, and uninhabited types in Rust
One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an…
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Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
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When to bring in the heavy hitters (2017)
Three questions to ask yourself before making a senior hire
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Comparing City Street Orientations
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
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Free static websites with SSL for hackers
Note: GitLab Pages now fully integrate with Let’s Encrypt , making this post obsolete.
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How Generative Music Works
For his 1965 composition “It's Gonna Rain”, Steve Reich designed a generative mechanical system.
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Porting C to Rust
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Paxos derived
Lamport's fault-intolerant state machine replication algorithm In 1978, Lamport published his classic "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of E...
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Projects to Help You Learn React (2017)
As an intermediate beginner, the basic tutorials are too easy now. But it's hard to figure out what to build for practice, and how big those projects should be.
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
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Hyperliterature
The vast majority of fiction on the web is nonergodic : stories presented as linear text. Yet, in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, literature can take on any shape imaginable. In recent years, some pieces have taken advantage of these capabilities—not as a gimmick, but in a way that is…
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Attack of the Week: Group Messaging in WhatsApp and Signal
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that secure messaging is one of my favorite topics. However, recently I’ve been a bit disappointed. My sadness comes from the fact that lately …