1981
Software design gets worse before it gets better
The price of improving structure
1982
DJI – The ART of obfuscation
Study of an Android runtime (ART) hijacking mechanism for bytecode injection through a step-by-step analysis of the packer used to protect the DJI Pilot Android application.
1983
Collision Detection (2015)
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
1984
Pharo 12
Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.
1985
An open-source flow battery kit
Kirk Smith’s personal blog
1986
Are you better than a language model at predicting the next word?
A quiz to see how you compare to language models.
1987
Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?
Last week an important judicial ruling came down on a very intriguing case about open source license compliance. In this post, I'll talk about what makes it so interesting and potentially impactful across our industry.
1988
Sans-IO: The secret to effective Rust for network services
Learn how Firezone uses the sans-IO pattern to build testable, deterministic Rust networking code. A deep dive into our connlib design.
1989
Satellites Spotting Aircraft
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
1990
Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction
A blog about math by Nic Ford
1991
Multi-tenant queues in Postgres
How we implemented fair queueing strategies for Postgres-backed task queues to ensure fair execution time across tenants.
1992
It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU
If you ship a Web App in the EU and will be impacted by this, please sign our open letter to Tim Cook. It is critical that we gather as much evidence as possible to prevent Apple from breaking Web Apps in the EU.
1993
Making your own hot sauce
I like hot sauces. My favourite is Ring of fire, a hot sauce that I first encountered in the US. It is a mix of habanero and serrano chillis, tomatoes, vinegar and spices. It is very tasty and (des…
1994
Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
Four archetypes in software engineering
1995
iDOS 3 Rejected by Apple
Earlier quite a few iDOS users and supporters reached out to me to let me know about the recent AppStore policy change (Thanks, EU). In light of this, I decided to resubmit iDOS. However, it looks like Apple has blacklisted iDOS 2, preventing me from even requesting a review under that title, and I had to submit under…
1996
Don’t let your domain name become a sitting duck
More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds.
1997
Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes
In this post we will implement a data compression program in about 150 lines of Haskell. It will use Huffman coding and handle arbitrary binary files using constant memory for encoding and decoding.
1998
A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
I work in product growth helping people discover and use great software, currently at SurveyMonkey. In the past I've done it at Prismatic (acq. by LinkedIn), Clara Lending (acq. by Sofi), Right Side Up, Hubstaff. I've also enjoyed consulting with interesting companies like DoorDash, Empower, StitchFix, Calm, Dell…
1999
Reverse-engineering an encrypted IoT protocol
Extract metrics from your GoodWe solar PV system, and improve its security too
2000
PeerTube 6.3
This is the last minor release before v7, but it's packed with interesting new features! Let's have a look :) Separate audio and video streams for mor...
2001
2002
The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future you might want
A future you might actually want to live in.
2003
38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.
2004
The Influence of Bell Labs
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a generator of new technology.
2005
What happens if we remove 50 percent of Llama?
Discover Sparse Llama: A 50% pruned, GPU-optimized Llama 3.1 model with 2:4 sparsity, enabling faster, cost-effective inference without sacrificing accuracy.
2006
Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster?
For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained…
2007
When muscles work out, they help neurons to grow, a new study shows
Exercise can have benefits at the level of neurons, through chemical and mechanical effects, MIT researchers find. The discovery could inform exercise-related therapies for repairing damaged and deteriorating nerves.
2008
ZX Spectrum Raytracer
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
2009
Affordable Wheel Based Refreshable Braille Display
On HN [1] I came into contact with Mahmoud Al-Qudsi ( mqudsi@neosmart.net ) , who mentioned that he'd been working off-and-on on a braille reader that is both affordable and easy to manufacture. He sent me a some files and pointed to a patent [2] that he took out on a device that uses octagonal wheels with codes on…
2010
Typing lists and tuples in Elixir
This article explores the design decisions of typing lists and tuples in Elixir within a sound gradual type system.