2101
2102
The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
2103
The Private Blockchain Fallacy
In all the blockchain hype, a simple, yet self-refuting idea keeps popping up: a Private Blockchain .
2104
Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google
This blog post distills the key findings of our longitudinal analysis of how Europe’s right to be forgotten (RTBF) is being applied in practice.
2105
The BEAM needs an APL-y language
One like, one unpopular opinion is one of them top Twitter games, innit?
2106
2107
Losing the Nobel Prize
There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My…
2108
“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it
2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…
2109
Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009)
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
2110
2111
Using parallel sequential scan in PostgreSQL
Parallel sequential scan is the first parallel access method in PostgreSQL and is introduced in version 9.6. The committer of this featu...
2112
2113
2114
Going FLOSS-only on Android
Someone recently asked me how my experience has been with a couple of ROMs I have tried on my Android phone. Which reminded me that I need to write a post de...
2115
MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
2116
2117
2118
Tokyo and Hong Kong in 2018
TL;DR: Tokyo is insanely clean, feels sadly old but still futuristic. Its size will mess with your head. Hong Kong was designed for bankers with slaves but has that mesmerizing Blade Runner skyline.
2119
2120
2121
How to Block Stingray Devices
Disable 2G On Android To Block Stingray Devices 1) Pull up the phone dialer and dial *#*#4636#*#* (that spells INFO) 2) This brings you to the testing screen, select "Phone/Device information". 3) Scroll down a little to "preferred network type", select the arrow. 4) Change it to LTE/WCDMA Only. It…
2122
Union Types in Flow and Reason
Union types are powerful yet often overlooked. At work, I've been using Flow which thankfully supports union types. But as I've refactored more of our code to use union types, I've noticed that our bundle size has been steadily increasing!
2123
2124
2125
Silicon die analysis: inside an op amp with interesting “butterfly” transistors
Some integrated circuits have very interesting dies under a microscope, like the chip below with designs that look kind of like butterflies....
2126
An EPYC NixOS Build Farm
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.
2127
2128
Algorithm efficiency comes from problem information
This is a high level post about algorithms (especially mathematical, scientific, and data analysis algorithms) which I hope can help people who are not researchers or numerical software developers better understand how to choose and evaluate algorithms. When scientists and programmers think about efficiency of…
2129
2130
Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability (2017)
For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a couple…