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The End of Windows
The Windows division no longer exists at Microsoft, marking the end to a four-year process of changing Microsoft’s culture.
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The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security
Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said
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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that's had a strong influence on countle...
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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding
‘Puisque ces mystères me dépassent, feignons d’en être l’organisateur.’ –Jean Cocteau. Click to read Quariety, by anas sabbar, a Substack publication. Launched 6 years ago.
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Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet
A handy rule of thumb for creating a confidence interval for the probability of an event you haven't seen happen yet.
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I discovered a browser bug
I accidentally discovered a huge browser bug a few months ago and I'm pretty excited about it. Security engineers always seem like the "cool kids" to me, so I'm hoping that now I can be part of the club, and y'know, get into the special parties or whatever.
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The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
The Benjamin Franklin method for programming books: read a code sample, close the book, and rewrite it from memory to truly learn it.
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Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text
In early 2016 I realized that it was possible to use zero-width characters, like zero-width non-joiner or other zero-width characters like the zero-width space to fingerprint text. Even with just a single type of zero-width character the presence or non-presence of the non-visible character is enough bits to…
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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)
In early 2016 I eventually decided it was my turn to take part in this project. I decided my job was going to be presenting the potential and the beauty inside these sketches. I selected those that I found most interesting and genuine and diverse, then rendered them as if they were real. I became the executor of these…
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I don’t understand Graph Theory
Graph theory represents one of the most important and interesting areas in computer science. But at the same time it’s one of the most…
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Instagram’s CEO
The surprising resignation of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger should not, in fact, be surprising: this became inevitable the moment they sold Instagram to Facebook.
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Color: From Hex codes to Eyeballs
If you're curious about rainbows, colorimetry, gamma encoding, and experiments run in the late 1920s, then this is the post for you!
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Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…
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The hotel bathroom puzzle
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
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Some notes about HTTP/3
HTTP/3 is going to be standardized. As an old protocol guy, I thought I'd write up some comments. Google (pbuh) has both the most popular ...
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I've compiled the best SaaS Landing pages and broke down all their secrets
We'll Rewrite Your SaaS Landing Page Into A High…2018561 points88 commentsTech Industry & Business details
SaaS Landing page inspiration is usually "pretty" but not conversion/result driven so in this article, I compiled the best SaaS Landing pages examples I've seen and broke-down their secrets for conversions!
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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
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What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
Explains how expensive it is to advertise on YouTube, what is involved in launching a campaign and finally tweaking it towards profitability.
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps
A new type of banking scam involving fake business listings is taking over Google [3 min read]
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Write Your Own Virtual Machine
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
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Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...