GNU ed ate my homework
If you have ever ventured into the archives of old UNIX books and mailing lists, you will have undoubtedly come across the legend of ed. ed (pronounced /iː …
Giving Haiku Beta 3 a try
Projects and Writings of Marc Carson.
Leaked Chats Show Lapsus$ Stole T-Mobile Source Code
KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects…
The recent Bank of Japan meeting and its implications for markets
Listen now | The Bank of Japan sudden change of heart has important global implications
The First Three Discworld Games
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464 , which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word…
My Notes on the Lean Startup
Kevin Lin builds tools for humans and agents.
3D Printed Film Video Camera
An expensive and unreliable way to record low quality videos!
Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...
How to create a more effective homepage
A step-by-step guide on improving your homepage content & copy to increase conversion
GNU/Linux shell related internals
What every SRE should know about GNU/Linux shell related internals: file descriptors, pipes, terminals, user sessions, process groups and daemons # Last updated: Oct 2025 Contents File descriptor and open file description Pipes Process groups, jobs and sessions Terminals and pseudoterminals Despite the era of…
There Is No CD Revival
Unless Maybe You are Adele
My experience as a Unit-18 Berkeley Lecturer
From spring 2021 through spring 2022, I was a Unit-18 Lecturer for UC Berkeley in the EECS department. A Unit-18 lecturer is what is often c...
C23 Implications for C Libraries
The upcomming standard C23 has a lot of additions to the C library clause. Most of them are small, some of them are big but optional.
Take my app ideas
I would rather give away my favorite ideas than to let them go to waste. Please do something with them.
What's in a good error message?
As software developers, we’ve all come across those annoying, not-so-useful error messages when using some library or framework: "Couldn’t parse config file", "Lacking permission for this operation", …
Notes on ExFAT and Reliability (2021)
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
A/B test improved your website's conversion rate? Not so fast
Many internet companies use A/B testing to evaluate the performance of website changes they want to make. A typical metric in such scenarios is the conversion rate (CVR) of a user, i.e. the probability that a user converts (e.g. makes a purchase) on the website. A typical A/B test setup in such a situation would…
Converting integers to decimal strings faster with AVX-512
In most systems, integers are stored using a fixed binary representation. It is common to store integers using 32-bit or 64-bit words. You sometimes need to convert it to a string. For example, the integer 12345 might need to be converted to the five characters '12345'. In an earlier blog post, I presented the simpler…
The Capital Sponge
January 16, 2022 Latest Article: The Importance of Price Signals This newsletter issue takes a look at the self-reinforcing cycle that stuffed excess global capital into the US stock market over the past 40 years (and especially the past decade) like a sponge soaking up water, along with an examination of catalysts…
Alan Turing using math to repair his bike
Audio Link With the arrival of summer weather in many parts of the U.S., it’s time to think again about various outdoor activities. Wat...
Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Self-host your static assets (2019)
Why is it so much better to self-host your static assets?
Prefix Sum with SIMD
In other words, the $k$-th element of the output sequence is the sum of the first $k$ elements of the input sequence.
Startup childhood – Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form
Tiny startups are not Google-in-miniature-form