On your Python learning journey, you may have heard that a great way to get better is to read code written by other people. That's true, but finding good code to study is not easy, mostly because the design philosophy and the reasoning behind the code are rarely documented. The Python standard library is special in…
The American pattern of development creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed…and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.
I'm super enthusiastic about Julia after running this comparison of Julia vs Numpy vs Fortran, for performance and code simplicity.
In our team at Rakuten, we have been using Elm1 in production for almost two years now. This post is about our story, the lessons we learned, and our likes and dislikes. This post is quite long so if you prefer to see an overview, feel free to jump to the index. Everything started in the Berlin branch of Rakuten…
I’ve been hearing about io_uring on and off for the last couple of years. Its a relatively new technology in Linux to allow high-performance IO with very few overheads. Whenever its been mentioned, its usually been presented as a new alternative to select, poll and epoll. This led me to believe that it was just the…
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
Author: Mihai Avram | Date: 10/02/2021 The area of web scraping has really expanded in the last few years, and it helps to know some of the main frameworks, protocols, and etiquette so that you can…
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11…
Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…
Back in college, I was very interested in Java bytecode. When I got an internship at Google in 2013, I was skeptical of the security of the Java version of Google App Engine and got permission to spend the last week of my internship doing a mini red team exercise, trying to break into App Engine. This is the story of…
When someone passed me hundreds of thousands of records on kids taken from CloudPets a few years ago [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/] , I had a nightmare of a time getting in touch with the company. They'd
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
As a bank, we have a lot of secrets we need to protect to keep our customers and ourselves safe. These include private keys that only we know, which we use to digitally sign requests as coming from us (sort of like a private password). These private keys are super important and are used all over Monzo and when…
Design your hiring process to find the right people to strengthen your teams' weaknesses, rather than trying to find the best people. Instead of "how can we find the smartest people?" think about "how can we find the people who will make our team stronger?"
Docker has recently stormed into software development. While its concepts are powerful and valuable, similar tools have been used in systems for decades. FreeBSD’s jails in one of those tools which build upon even older chroot(2). To put it shortly, with these tools, you can make a safe environment separated from the…
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years later.
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the…
Considering every startup confronts this question at some point, I was surprised by how little has been written about it. Particularly anything actionable. So I decided to do my own digging. I spent the past month personally reaching out to founders, scouring interviews, and tapping the Twitterverse. Below, you’ll…
People sometimes ask me for robotics resources. There aren’t many high quality internet-first lists available on this topic, so I made one I can link to. I’ll continually update this list so feel free to give suggestions if things are missing or you have better links .
News post: Gleam v0.14 released!
A look back and forward on PHP
Firefox now supports the new AVIF image format, which is based on the modern and royalty free AV1 video codec. It offers significant bandwidth savings for sites compared to existing image formats. It also supports transparency and other advanced features.
