Posts from 2021

December 2021 124 posts

How a Single Line of Code Made a 24-core Server Slower Than a Laptop pkolaczk.github.io · “Then you run it on a big, fancy, multiprocessor machine, expecting even better performance, only to see it actually runs slower than the laptop, no matter how many cores you give it.”
Dec 31
My Setup for Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications + Services on a Single Server cprimozic.net · “I run everything off of a single dedicated server from OVH hosted in Hillsboro, Oregon.”
Dec 31
How Telegram Messenger circumvents Google Translate's API danpetrov.xyz · “Telegram found some obscure way of querying the Cloud Translate API directly at no cost to them.”
Dec 31
The Modern Guide to OAuth fusionauth.io · “This flexibility is one reason for confusion when it comes to OAuth.”
Dec 31
The Gift of It's Your Problem Now apenwarr.ca · “Anyway, gifts will not get you 24-hour guaranteed response times to security incidents.”
Dec 30
Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study med.stanford.edu · “Neither the researcher administering the procedure nor the participant knew whether the participant was receiving real treatment.”
Dec 30
macOS Setup after 15 Years of Linux hookrace.net · “I haven’t heard the fan turn on at all yet, so either my workloads, and even my compilations, are too light-weight, or the fan is pretty quiet.”
Dec 30
Databases in 2021: A Year in Review ottertune.com · “The conventional wisdom among developers has shifted: PostgreSQL has become the first choice in new applications.”
Dec 30
FAA Investigating Controversial Crash Video avweb.com · “There is commentary on the weather and reference to his deceased friend but no description of the circumstances of the alleged engine failure.”
Dec 29
You can't copy code with memcpy; code is more complicated than that devblogs.microsoft.com · “I’m just going to say it right now: The entire idea that went into this code is fundamentally flawed.”
Dec 29
95644 – [F2018] IEEE_FMA is missing from the IEEE_ARITHMETIC module gcc.gnu.org · “The customer has nuclear weapons.”
Dec 29
Consider SQLite blog.wesleyac.com · “Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?”
Dec 29
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects drewdevault.com · “Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t.”
Dec 28
LastPass users warned their master passwords are compromised bleepingcomputer.com · “However, users receiving these warnings have stated that their passwords are unique to LastPass and not used elsewhere.”
Dec 28
Lessons from my PhD web.eecs.utk.edu · “If you show up to a meeting/internship/job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do.”
Dec 28
Japan's Paper Culture jetpens.com · “Despite Japan’s international reputation for using futuristic technology, the country still uses a lot of paper.”
Dec 28
Italian Courts Find Open Source Software Terms Enforceable ifthisbetreason.com · “The issue was that the software was redistributed without including acknowledgment of the original work, including information about changes the defendants had made to the software, and with no mention of the software’s copyright holders.”
Dec 27
Bill 27: Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work gowlingwlg.com · “While several US States have enacted legislation prohibiting non-competes, Ontario is the first of the Canadian Provinces to do so.”
Dec 27
Ubisoft Deleted Account With Hundreds Of Dollars' Worth Of Games For Inactivity mmos.com · “When he tried contacting Ubisoft regarding the email, the company’s representatives told him that they won’t be able to recover any of his games because his account had been closed.”
Dec 27
"Widevine Dump": Leaked Code Downloads HD Video from Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix torrentfreak.com · “The tools to bypass the strictest protection are made available through private channels and for a few days, they’ve been floating around in public as well.”
Dec 27
25 Anti-Mimetic Tactics for Living a Counter-Cultural Life epsilontheory.com · “But Girard’s finding went deeper: it’s not only what they do, but what they want that we also mimic.”
Dec 26
You block ads in your browser, why not in your city? bearbin.net · “Blocking ads may work online, but unless you spend your life in VR goggles, one cannot apply technical solutions alone.”
Dec 26
Ten Years of Logging My Life chaidarun.com · “Often I become engrossed in whatever I’m doing and forget about biological obligations like eating.”
Dec 26
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code stackoverflow.blog · “Today, for about a thousand dollars, you can purchase a nanopore sequencer as a peripheral that connects to any computer via USB.”
Dec 26
LICENSE updated to template github.com · “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”
Dec 25
A new coefficient of correlation arxiv.org · “No assumptions are needed on the distributions of the variables.”
Dec 25
Ruby 3.1.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “But even though the Optcarrot benchmark has shown impressive speedups, the JIT has not benefited real world business applications.”
Dec 25
Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes righto.com · “I dissolved the epoxy package in boiling sulfuric acid to expose the silicon die inside.”
Dec 25
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one utcc.utoronto.ca · “The big providers are crushing the field through the sheer amount of resources they can throw at problems, including and especially problems that matter to users like security and spam filtering.”
Dec 24
A Whole Website in a Single HTML File css-tricks.com · “Anyway, using :target like this is super smart stuff!”
Dec 24
Average colors of the world eox.at · “The difference here is I didn’t even try to tell a story with these maps… I just made them as something pretty to look at.”
Dec 24
Exiled from the Metaverse before it even started: the dangers of relying on Facebook brian.jp · “But even then there are routes to appeal, you can be granted clemency, parole, et cetera.”
Dec 24
Street Fighter II, paper trails fabiensanglard.net · “The solution came under the form of paper sheets and scissors.”
Dec 23
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file jeffhuang.com · “I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 14 years now.”
Dec 23
Krita 5.0 released! krita.org · “The new system is much faster, uses much less memory and is much more dependable!”
Dec 23
The interview that disappeared josimarfootball.com · “No official reason for his arrest has been given by Qatari authorities.”
Dec 23
CFPB Shutters Lending by VC-Backed Fintech for Violating Agency Order consumerfinance.gov · “The order would also impose a $100,000 civil money penalty based on LendUp’s demonstrated inability to pay.”
Dec 22
How to Draw S-Curved Arrows Between Boxes / Rectangles dragonman225.js.org · “The solution is to add some rules to abandon combinations that are undesired.”
Dec 22
Tinder just permabanned me or the problem with big tech paulefou.com · “Now I didn’t have a single match, had 0 likes, and yet I was able to violate their terms of service, pretty impressive isn’t it?”
Dec 22
MS Teams: 1 feature, 4 vulnerabilities positive.security · “We determined that this issue does not require immediate security service and we assessed this as low severity for temporary DoS that requires restart of application.”
Dec 22
Hidden Networks in TP-Link Routers jahed.dev · “Turns out, TP-Link thinks it’s a great idea to have hidden pre-configured always-on networks on all of their routers.”
Dec 21
The Belgian government has removed 'backdoor requirement' from new law after international protest tutanota.com · “This draft included a passage that would have forced companies such as WhatsApp and Signal to decrypt their encrypted chats upon request by the authorities for criminal investigation.”
Dec 21
RCE in Visual Studio Code's Remote WSL for Fun and Negative Profit parsiya.net · “JavaScript in websites can connect to this server and execute arbitrary commands on the target system.”
Dec 21
MOFCOM Issues New Encryption Import Control Effective Immediately sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com · “Encryption technologies with encryption strength exceeding the specified threshold can no longer be freely transferred to a Chinese party.”
Dec 21
A challenger to the throne of vector graphics. SVG is dead, long live TinyVG! zig.news · “SVG is so complex that different implementations of SVG disagree how an image should look.”
Dec 20
Against 3X Speed perell.com · “The problem is that shoving information into your mind can create the illusion of knowledge, especially when you rush it.”
Dec 20
LISP with GC in 436 bytes justine.lol · “Since we only needed 436 bytes, that means LISP has now outdistanced FORTH and BASIC to be the tiniest programming language in the world.”
Dec 20
This is my Mum's 80th birthday present. fourlightyears.blogspot.com · “There were over 60 messages, which I assigned to phone numbers 100 to 160.”
Dec 20
An iframe from googlesyndication.com tries to access the Camera and Microphone techsparx.com · “There is no legitimate purpose for an advertising network to access either the camera or microphone.”
Dec 19
The Big DevOps Misunderstanding wolfoliver.medium.com · “In my opinion, this is not DevOps but an evolution of simple system operations (SysOps).”
Dec 19
My Parents Collect Cans for a Living thenation.com · “Although this center has been like my second home for the past 10 years, I have kept it mostly a secret.”
Dec 19
Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer localghost.dev · “What I’m trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head.”
Dec 19
Is internet addiction eradicating the habit of reading? benwajdi.com · “I myself have tried a similar experiment: instead of consuming PDFs, I print them, and actively read them (taking notes while thinking about the material).”
Dec 18
My Bose QC-35 II headphones suddenly burst into flames and left me with chemical burns recursive-public-rants.blogspot.com · “I pull them off and suddenly toxic white smoke and immense heat emerged from them.”
Dec 18
Closing the loop: a deep dive on a Facebook reseller of bikes stolen in Colorado bikeindex.org · “In early 2021, several people tipped us off to a Facebook seller in Juarez, Mexico who appeared to be selling bikes stolen from Colorado.”
Dec 18
Boston Police Bought Spy Tech With a Pot of Money Hidden From the Public propublica.org · “A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.”
Dec 18
Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg bmj.com · “We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime.”
Dec 17
President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment purdueexponent.org · “Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”
Dec 17
Announcing Tokio Console 0.1 tokio.rs · “Until now, understanding the state of an async runtime has required developers to interpret event logs.”
Dec 17
CCPA Scam November 2021 from Princeton University blog.freeradical.zone · “I had a minor panic attack, literally, upon receipt, as I thought I was about to be sued.”
Dec 17
Don't start with microservices in production – monoliths are your friend arnoldgalovics.com · “In a regular monolith system, you either deploy completely or you don’t deploy at all.”
Dec 16
From Node to Ruby on Rails nikodunk.com · “Building the web app in Rails took me 2 days – the same thing in Node would have taken 2 weeks.”
Dec 16
Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox's Default Browser Workaround howtogeek.com · “Basically, this means that “microsoft-edge:// links” can no longer be forced to open in your default browser of choice.”
Dec 16
Pelosi defends stock trading by lawmakers and their spouses: 'We are a free-market economy' marketwatch.com · “Yet, in the nearly 10 years since it was enacted, no one has been prosecuted under it, even as many members continue to conspicuously trade.”
Dec 16
A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution googleprojectzero.blogspot.com · “It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying.”
Dec 15
New tool: Mess with DNS! jvns.ca · “I learn a lot more from seeing what happens when things go wrong than from things going right.”
Dec 15
Apple Removes All References to Controversial CSAM Scanning Feature From Its Child Safety Webpage macrumors.com · “However, despite Apple’s efforts, the controversy didn’t go away.”
Dec 15
How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls signal.org · “There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we built our own open source Signal Calling Service to do the job.”
Dec 15
I blew $720 on 100 notebooks from Alibaba and started a Paper Website business daily.tinyprojects.dev · “In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.”
Dec 14
Plans you're not supposed to talk about dynomight.net · “Critically, you get everyone to agree that it’s gauche to discuss the reasons for doing all this.”
Dec 14
Dude this should NOT be in a Dell Switch... or HPE Supercomputer servethehome.com · “While we have been able to confirm these stickers on four different models in the Dell S5200-ON line, we have reason to believe they go beyond just Dell.”
Dec 14
Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain bunniestudios.com · “After waiting about 28 weeks, on August 12th, we got an email from our distributor informing us that they had to cancel our entire order for SiT8021s.”
Dec 14
Neon Genesis Evangelion fontsinuse.com · “Subcontractors usually painted anything type-related in an anime by hand, so it was a novel idea at the time for a director to use desktop typesetting to exert typographic control.”
Dec 13
Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn't support it downtowndougbrown.com · “I am now able to boot into Windows with 16 GB of RAM installed in my computer, as long as I use GRUB as my bootloader with the write_byte command above.”
Dec 13
Deno joins TC39 deno.com · “We will be pushing for features and improvements to the language that benefit everyone, but especially users of server-side JavaScript.”
Dec 13
Reimagining Projections for the Interactive Maps Era mapbox.com · “Despite many passionate campaigns by cartographers and mapping enthusiasts, Web Mercator remains dominant.”
Dec 13
Power solar.lowtechmagazine.com · “When the voltage of the battery drops below 12V, and the whole page is coloured in blue, the solar charge controller shuts down the system and the website goes offline.”
Dec 12
The Matrix is Unreal fxguide.com · “Other than those shots, the experience renders in real-time on a standard console.”
Dec 12
Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice commoncog.com · “Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through descriptions.”
Dec 12
The Internet Has a Rat Poison Problem audubon.org · “It contained 12 pounds of waxy pink seed-size pellets laced with brodifacoum, a chemical engineered to trigger massive internal bleeding and hemorrhaging when digested, whether by rat, dog, bird, or child.”
Dec 12
log4j: between a rock and a hard place crawshaw.io · “It is the second statement in this tweet that is worthy of attention: the maintainers of log4j would have loved to remove this bad feature long ago, but could not because of the backwards compatibility promises they are held to.”
Dec 11
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call blog.filippo.io · “As of yesterday, the maintainer who patched the vulnerability had three sponsors on GitHub : Michael, Glenn, and Matt.”
Dec 11
Mercedes Beats Tesla to Hands-Free Driving on the Autobahn ttnews.com · “The automaker got the green light to sell its Drive Pilot package for use on stretches of the country’s Autobahn network at a speed of up to 37 miles per hour, Mercedes said Dec. 9.”
Dec 11
Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens kevin.burke.dev · “Coderpad must work for some people since companies are able to hire a nonzero number of engineers, but it is definitely not a good fit for me.”
Dec 11
Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí really works livescience.com · “The researchers found that the participants who spent at least 15 seconds in the N1 stage had an 83% chance of discovering the hidden rule, compared with a 30% chance for those who remained awake.”
Dec 10
Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules bbc.com · “In line with previous cases, the Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that when the US administration gives a promise to the UK of fair and humane treatment of a detainee, its word should not be doubted.”
Dec 10
Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region aws.amazon.com · “This congestion immediately impacted the availability of real-time monitoring data for our internal operations teams, which impaired their ability to find the source of congestion and resolve it.”
Dec 10
Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware anishathalye.com · “Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.”
Dec 10
Tailwind CSS v3.0 tailwindcss.com · “Before the new engine, we always had to be careful with CSS file size in development, and one of the biggest trade-offs we had to make was carefully limiting the color palette.”
Dec 9
Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening eff.org · “Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.”
Dec 9
"Free PACER" Bill Advances Through Senate Judiciary Unanimously fixthecourt.com · “There’s no reason the American public should pay for public documents.”
Dec 9
Number of journalists behind bars reaches global high cpj.org · “China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 behind bars.”
Dec 9
Apple CEO Tim Cook 'Secretly' Signed $275 Billion Deal With China in 2016 macrumors.com · “Other internal documents reportedly showed that Apple’s pledge amounted to more than $275 billion in spending over a period of five years.”
Dec 8
Improving GitHub code search github.blog · “At the moment, the search index covers more than five million of the most popular public repositories; in addition, you can search private repositories you have access to.”
Dec 8
Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer david-colson.com · “The PS1 had no such depth buffer and it was up to the developer to draw all the necessary primitive shapes in the correct order, starting at the back and drawing closer things later.”
Dec 8
How to write idempotent Bash scripts arslan.io · “But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they were already applied to your system.”
Dec 8
Cloudflare Images has a lot of issues blog.klungo.no · “Since there is no way to retrieve the original image from CF Images, customers are completely locked into their cloud.”
Dec 7
How a Kalman filter works, in pictures bzarg.com · “Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, and that makes me sad because it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty.”
Dec 7
NASA Returns Hubble to Full Science Operations nasa.gov · “Hubble has been operating now for over 31 years, collecting ground-breaking science observations that have changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.”
Dec 7
You Can't Buy Integration martinfowler.com · “When you buy an integration product, you are agreeing to build the integration itself in a commercial programming language.”
Dec 7
Debunking Cloudflare's recent performance tests fastly.com · “Cloudflare used a free Fastly trial account to conduct their tests.”
Dec 6
Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy airgradient.com · “However, the Vindriktning shows you a green light until 35 μg/m³ which is SEVEN TIMES the WHO air quality guideline.”
Dec 6
WebAssembly and Back Again: Fine-Grained Sandboxing in Firefox 95 hacks.mozilla.org · “Accordingly, we’ve updated our bug bounty program to pay researchers for bypassing the sandbox even without a vulnerability in the isolated library.”
Dec 6
Why don't you accept donations? github.com · “I want to be free to move on to something else if ever I get tired of working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).”
Dec 6
Apple broke up with me merecivilian.com · “Do not get too attached to your Apple account; it belongs to Apple, NOT YOU!”
Dec 5
How Amazon beats supply chain chaos with ships and long-haul planes cnbc.com · “It’s even taking control at the first step of the shipping journey by making its own 53-foot cargo containers in China.”
Dec 5
One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again dither8.xyz · “Today I want to look back at a development mistake that was made in Beta 1.8, one that took a decade to recover from.”
Dec 5
Simple Raspberry Pi powered SMS Gateway blog.haschek.at · “But for most of the scenarios mentioned above you might not rely on external sms gateways or APIs because they should also work if your internet goes out.”
Dec 5
It's official, ADSL works over wet string revk.uk · “It turns out he needed salty water to get anywhere.”
Dec 4
How to use dig jvns.ca · “Also I learned recently that you can set up a .digrc configuration file to make its output easier to read and it makes it SO MUCH nicer to use.”
Dec 4
The fraud supply chain bam.kalzumeus.com · “Most misappropriation of payment credentials happens at an industrial scale.”
Dec 4
USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat's Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables tidbits.com · “USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need.”
Dec 4
Germany: New government plans 'right to encryption' tutanota.com · “There will be a right to encryption, and the state must also offer the option of genuine encrypted communication.”
Dec 3
Blender 3.0 blender.org · “Cycles GPU kernels have been rewritten for better performance, rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.”
Dec 3
LEGO has designed a set that can't be taken apart brickset.com · “However, the company’s latest release, 75313 AT-AT, has broken from this tradition and some sub-assemblies within it are impossible to dismantle without resorting to using sharp metal implements.”
Dec 3
U.S. Indicts Two Men for Running a $20 Million YouTube Content ID Scam torrentfreak.com · “Starting sometime in 2017 through to at least April 30, 2021, Fernandez and Teran began monetizing music on YouTube for a vast library of more than 50,000 songs, none of which they owned the rights to.”
Dec 3
100 years of whatever this will be apenwarr.ca · “One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance.”
Dec 2
Ideal monitor rotation for programmers sprocketfox.io · “It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80 column limit.”
Dec 2
Google Removes Pirate Bay Domains from Search Results Citing Dutch Court Order torrentfreak.com · “As far as we know, this is the first time that Google has complied with a pirate site blocking order without being named.”
Dec 2
Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags mattblaze.org · “In my experiments, I found I could sometimes achieve approximately 90 dB attenuation by carefully wrapping the generator in foil and double folding the seams on all sides, which is quite good (comparable to commercial pouches).”
Dec 2
This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem googleprojectzero.blogspot.com · “The untrusted signature is simply copied into this fixed-sized buffer, overwriting adjacent members with arbitrary attacker-controlled data.”
Dec 1
Supersonic Projectile Exceeds Engineers Dreams: The Supersonic Trebuchet hackaday.com · “How about a whip-cracking, sonic-booming speed in excess of 450 meters per second!”
Dec 1
Instagram is Facebook now embedded.substack.com · “I’m getting almost as much content that I didn’t choose to see as content I did, and that is not Instagram.”
Dec 1
Firefox's Optimized Zip Format: Reading Zip Files Really Quickly taras.glek.net · “So for all cases where zip file access pattern matches one recorded during profiling phase Firefox can read the relevant resources in a single IO!”
Dec 1

November 2021 120 posts

Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe news.ycombinator.com · “So 20 minutes is all needed to identify “important, critical leaders”?”
Nov 30
4x smaller, 50x faster blog.asciinema.org · “The new implementation of the virtual terminal interpreter in Rust (compiled to WASM) does it 50x faster.”
Nov 30
Hubris and Humility oxide.computer · “Cliff dove into a sketch of his ideas, giving the nascent system a name that felt perfectly apt: Hubris.”
Nov 30
The American Prison System's War on Reading proteanmag.com · “This April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners.”
Nov 30
Firefox is the Only Alternative batsov.com · “In the meantime every competitor that Google converts to Chromium strengthens their position and increases the influence they have over the future of web standards.”
Nov 29
Welcome to Fleet! blog.jetbrains.com · “Fleet has been built from scratch with a new architecture and user interface.”
Nov 29
The Origins of 'Horn OK Please,' India's Most Ubiquitous Phrase atlasobscura.com · “Trucks, in particular, are often not even equipped with side mirrors in the first place.”
Nov 29
Schemaverse · A space war played in SQL schemaverse.com · “Every player is a PostgreSQL role.”
Nov 29
Proof of stake is a scam and the people promoting it are scammers yanmaani.github.io · “When I say that, I mean that proof of stake is (1) claimed to be a consensus system, and (2) constitutionally incapable of actually producing a consensus.”
Nov 28
Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in landmark case trtworld.com · “Since 2019, global publishing giants Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society have tried to block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen in India.”
Nov 28
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? A Statistician's Perspective covid-datascience.com · “English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.”
Nov 28
The Story Behind This Famed SR-71 Blackbird Super Low Knife-Edge Pass theaviationgeekclub.com · “At this point we weren’t really flying, but were falling in a slight bank.”
Nov 28
Bank transfers as a payment method bam.kalzumeus.com · “Stripped to its fundamentals: a payment is a message, with new information, about a debt, with a certain confidence level associated with it.”
Nov 27
Researchers' novel mind-body program outperforms other forms of treatment for chronic back pain bidmc.org · “Donnino and colleagues enrolled 35 participants, 18 to 67 years old with chronic back pain that lacked a clear physical origin.”
Nov 27
How did this paypal spoof email pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC security.stackexchange.com · “I happened to look at the original and it says SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passed.”
Nov 27
Soviet Rocket Engines everydayastronaut.com · “This article aims to summarize the background of well-known and not so well-known Soviet rocket engines, the history of their development, their main characteristics, and the rockets they flew on.”
Nov 27
Einstein Foundation to present the inaugural €500,000 Award for Promoting Quality in Research idw-online.de · “Paul Ginsparg is the founder of the preprint server arXiv.org, the first platform to exchange scientific discoveries among scientists immediately, openly and globally without review- and paywall restrictions.”
Nov 26
The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire krebsonsecurity.com · “Of these, MAIL-FROM has long been considered insecure, for the simple reason that it’s not difficult to spoof the return address of an email.”
Nov 26
Teach Yourself Computer Science teachyourselfcs.com · “If you don’t have a solid mental model of how a computer actually works, all of your higher-level abstractions will be brittle.”
Nov 26
California port truckers 'drowning' in supply chain inefficiencies freightwaves.com · “Recently, some truckers were lined up for 10 hours to grab containers from one of the terminals that couldn’t handle the influx of trucks, even though the drivers had appointment times.”
Nov 26
Underrated reasons to be thankful dynomight.net · “That humans didn’t evolve under strong alpha selection, meaning that 99% of us don’t get eaten by birds in our first moments of life as we crawl down the beach towards the ocean, which is nice.”
Nov 25
Black Friday: Which? warns over price offers bbc.com · “It said 184 out of 201 items from six retailers, which included Amazon and John Lewis, were priced the same or cheaper before Black Friday in 2020.”
Nov 25
SUCCESS! New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance reclaimyourface.eu · “The newly-agreed German government coalition has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other biometric surveillance.”
Nov 25
Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today theverge.com · “Drop bread, get toast.”
Nov 25
QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time phoboslab.org · “It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression.”
Nov 24
Samsung plans $17 billion chip plant in Taylor, Texas datacenterdynamics.com · “Taylor previously offered Samsung property tax breaks of over 90 percent for its first ten years.”
Nov 24
Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money stevenbuccini.com · “They thought they needed to build a machine learning model when they really needed to build an entirely new organization , one that possessed the technical and cultural mindset necessary to succeed in this space.”
Nov 24
The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger stephendiehl.com · “Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database.”
Nov 24
Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware apple.com · “To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices.”
Nov 23
Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You reactionwheel.net · “Even calling it “transitions” downplays the subject.”
Nov 23
42 things I learned from building a production database maheshba.bitbucket.io · “In the four years that I led the team (until Spring 2021), we did not experience a single severe outage (nothing higher than a SEV3).”
Nov 23
Flatpak Is Not the Future ludocode.com · “I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.”
Nov 23
mod team resignation github.com · “The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately.”
Nov 22
Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5. Here's How. blog.kraken.com · “Because, unlike a regular password, you leave your fingerprint on taxi doors, iPhone screens, and glasses of wine at your local restaurant.”
Nov 22
The World's Deadliest Thing the-angry-chef.com · “Just over two-hundred years later, that same substance would become the most valuable in the world, spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
Nov 22
Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law following LSE report findings lse.ac.uk · “The review drew on over 300 existing scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience in cephalopods (including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish).”
Nov 22
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This zachholman.com · “Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation.”
Nov 21
The Stroad strongtowns.org · “We like to call them “the futon of transportation” because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.”
Nov 21
Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation pnas.org · “We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock.”
Nov 21
Dell XPS13 RAM Upgrade (7390) gregdavill.github.io · “But I’m an electronics engineer, and reasonably proficient at BGA rework.”
Nov 21
VertiWalk - Vertical Walking vertiwalk.com · “By exploiting the potential of the human body and materials, only a fraction of effort is required, compared to taking stairs.”
Nov 20
Microsoft Edge's new 'Buy now, pay later' feature is the definition of bloatware xda-developers.com · “I don’t want to see advertisements from my browser for a payment company when I’m trying to buy something, and at least right now, Microsoft hasn’t mentioned any way of turning it off.”
Nov 20
Experts From A World That No Longer Exists collaborativefund.com · “The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists.”
Nov 20
Bill of the Month: Critically ill woman skips ER after spouse's costly stitches npr.org · “In August, his wife, DeeAnn, feared going to the same emergency room where he was treated, delaying her diagnosis of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”
Nov 20
Elfshaker: Version control system fine-tuned for binaries github.com · “elfshaker is a low-footprint, high-performance version control system fine-tuned for binaries.”
Nov 19
Crypto Wash Trading arxiv.org · “We quantify the wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged over 70% of the reported volume.”
Nov 19
Swedish study suggests hiring discrimination is primarily a problem for men in female-dominated occupations psypost.org · “The study indicates that women are more likely to receive a response to entry-level job applications than men are.”
Nov 19
The 'Zelle Fraud' Scam: How it Works, How to Fight Back krebsonsecurity.com · “The upshot of all this is that many financial institutions will claim they’re not required to reimburse the customer for financial losses related to these voice phishing schemes.”
Nov 19
LAPD: Hidden Spy Camera Detection using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors dl.acm.org · “Tiny hidden spy cameras concealed in sensitive locations including hotels and bathrooms are becoming a significant threat worldwide.”
Nov 18
Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages searchengineland.com · “Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.”
Nov 18
10 years of... whatever this has been apenwarr.ca · “Bitcoin is casino chips.”
Nov 18
German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice blog.documentfoundation.org · “By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux.”
Nov 18
The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says niemanlab.org · “If you can subscribe online, you should be able to cancel your subscription online.”
Nov 17
Apple announces Self Service Repair apple.com · “Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022.”
Nov 17
How to Grow Sodium Chloride Crystals at Home crystalverse.com · “Many tutorials online make it look far easier than it actually is.”
Nov 17
XMPP, A Comeback Story: A 20 Year Old Messaging Protocol For Robust, Private and Decentralized Communications takebackourtech.org · “Communication platforms like WhatsApp, Google Talk, and Zoom use or used XMPP under the hood, and others like Facebook and Microsoft allowed for XMPP intercompatibility.”
Nov 17
Individuals matter danluu.com · “A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I’ve looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn’t matter who is doing what, as if individuals don’t matter.”
Nov 16
GitHub's commitment to npm ecosystem security github.blog · “Second, on November 2 we received a report to our security bug bounty program of a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to publish new versions of any npm package using an account without proper authorization.”
Nov 16
Why I Hate Password Rules schneier.com · “The site wanted at least two numbers.”
Nov 16
Letting users tick a 'none' checkbox designnotes.blog.gov.uk · “Unlike radio buttons which only allow a single answer, checkboxes allow users to select as many options as needed.”
Nov 16
Blacksmith: Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations comsec.ethz.ch · “We implement these patterns in our Rowhammer fuzzer named Blacksmith and show that it can bypass TRR on 100% of the PC-DDR4 DRAM devices in our test pool.”
Nov 15
Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter in return ships space.com · “Price noted that the anti-satellite test created more than 1,500 pieces of orbital debris large enough to track, in addition to “hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris.””
Nov 15
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents dkriesel.com · “The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect.”
Nov 15
These Mighty Shorebirds Keep Breaking Flight Records, And You Can Follow Along audubon.org · “Bar-tailed Godwits regularly travel more than 7,000 miles non-stop.”
Nov 15
Those Bullet Effects In Terminator 2 Weren't CGI hackaday.com · “Bullets fired at the “liquid metal” robot resulted only in a chrome-looking bullet splash that momentarily staggered the killing machine.”
Nov 14
This Colorado 'solar garden' is a farm under solar panels npr.org · “This year, the garden produced more than 8,000 pounds of produce, while the panels above generate enough power for 300 local homes.”
Nov 14
Facebook Employees Are Now More Willing to Leave, Tech Recruiters Say businessinsider.com · “Tech recruiters struggled for years to get people to leave Facebook.”
Nov 14
Why Disaster Happens at the Edges: An Introduction to Queue Theory thenewstack.io · “One of the notable findings of queue theory is that latency approaches infinity as utilization approaches 100%.”
Nov 14
It's Now Possible To Sign Arbitrary Data With Your SSH Keys agwa.name · “If you’re currently using PGP to sign data, you should consider switching to SSH signatures.”
Nov 13
Hoax Email Blast Abused Poor Coding in FBI Website krebsonsecurity.com · “I am contacting you today because we located a botnet being hosted on your forehead, please take immediate action thanks.”
Nov 13
Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos righto.com · “It defined the sound of 1980s pop music, used by bands from A-ha and Michael Jackson to Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston.”
Nov 13
Debit cards as financial infrastructure bam.kalzumeus.com · “They’re actually a core piece of financial infrastructure, accidentally upgraded checking accounts, and drive (and fund) much fintech innovation.”
Nov 13
Long Range E-Bike jacquesmattheij.com · “Working on a pack that size is like working on a live bomb.”
Nov 12
Portugal bans bosses texting staff after-hours bbc.co.uk · “Companies with more than 10 staff could face fines if they contact employees outside their contracted hours.”
Nov 12
Ruby vs Python comes down to the for loop softwaredoug.com · “With idiomatic Python, the object-model submits to the for loop.”
Nov 12
How Not To Sort By Average Rating evanmiller.org · “Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson.”
Nov 12
3D printed mirror array github.com · “The mirrors are angled so that just before sunset on our 8th anniversary, it reflects the light from the setting sun onto the ground to spell out “MARRY ME?””
Nov 11
American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent nrc.nl · “Booking.com requested help from the Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, in its investigation into the extensive data breach, but did not notify the affected customers or the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP).”
Nov 11
How to build a second brain as a software developer aseemthakar.com · “Google is the closest link, meaning we use the massive, unsorted network that is the Internet and Google’s interpretation of our problem as our “second brain”.”
Nov 11
Windows now blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links ctrl.blog · “Microsoft uses these links instead of regular web links to force users to open them in its Microsoft Edge web browser.”
Nov 11
Update to YouTube Dislike Counts support.google.com · “We are making the dislike count private to protect our creators by reducing targeted dislike attacks on their channels.”
Nov 10
How To Make A CPU - A Simple Picture Based Explanation blog.robertelder.org · “As the world of proprietary hardware and software crushes in around us, we risk losing the ability to make things for ourselves as individuals.”
Nov 10
The Gradual Extinction of Softness hippocampusmagazine.com · “It amazes me to recall a time when we had so much rice to spare, we could afford to let a little girl blacken it just for fun.”
Nov 10
The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor certitude.consulting · “What if a backdoor literally cannot be seen and thus evades detection even from thorough code reviews?”
Nov 10
Lesser Known PostgreSQL Features hakibenita.com · “To their surprise, more than 90% of what users asked for already existed, they just didn’t know about it.”
Nov 9
How We Saved Millions in SSD Costs by Upgrading Our Filesystem heap.io · “This amounts to a ~20% decrease in disk usage, which would have been a massive boon to our disk usage issues, not to mention a significant long-term reduction in our AWS bill.”
Nov 9
ProctorU is dystopian spyware shkspr.mobi · “They also want complete control over your laptop, including the ability to silently transfer files and run arbitrary programs.”
Nov 9
It's Mostly a Demand Shock, Not a Supply Shock, and It's Everywhere bridgewater.com · “The mechanics of combined monetary and fiscal stimulus are inherently inflationary: MP3 creates demand without creating any supply.”
Nov 9
You should use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community mooreds.com · “While there are tradeoffs in terms of convenience and closeness, for most developer communities a public, managed forum is better than a private, unsearchable Slack.”
Nov 8
How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet inputmag.com · “Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.”
Nov 8
iPhone Apps Can Tell Many Things About You Through the Accelerometer mysk.blog · “Currently, iOS allows any installed app to access accelerometer data without explicit permission from the user.”
Nov 8
Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM. In 3 Years, They'll Have to Do It Again wired.com · ““To go every three years is burdensome,” says Mark Richert, executive director at the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired.”
Nov 8
Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro–and I'm not alone macworld.com · “When Gregory McFadden tweeted that Control Center was using 26GB of the 64GB of RAM on his new MacBook Pro, the screenshot looked very familiar.”
Nov 7
Don't do interviews, do discussions thinkingthrough.substack.com · “That’s because I don’t do interviews anymore; I have discussions.”
Nov 7
Stop Making Students Use Eclipse nora.codes · “Teaching someone to use git is very difficult if they’ve never been taught that a file is an logical unit composed of bytes and metadata.”
Nov 7
Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies nayuki.io · “But fundamentally, there is a mismatch between the narrowness of hierarchies and the rich structure of human knowledge, and the proposed system will not presuppose the features of HFSes.”
Nov 7
Don't be spooky therealadam.com · “Never message someone on your team, “let’s talk when you get a minute”.”
Nov 6
An Epic future for SPJ discourse.haskell.org · “As you may know, I am leaving Microsoft Research at the end of November.”
Nov 6
The Room of the Slaves: The Latest Discovery at Civita Giuliana pompeiisites.org · “While two of them are about 1.7 metres long, one bed measures just 1.4 metres, and may therefore have belonged to a young man or child.”
Nov 6
Apple's New Screen Repair Trap Could Change the Repair Industry Forever ifixit.com · “The new iPhone 13 completely disables its flagship Face ID functionality when you replace its screen.”
Nov 6
How credit cards make money bam.kalzumeus.com · “Credit cards aren’t just a bundle, they’re a Mandelbrot set of bundles.”
Nov 5
Helion blog.samaltman.com · “Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024, and has a long-term goal of delivering electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.”
Nov 5
So you want to Scrape like the Big Boys? incolumitas.com · “What sane human being is browsing Instagram from within a docker container on a Hetzner VPS?!”
Nov 5
IAB Europe warns of GDPR breach finding techcrunch.com · “Is this the beginning of the end for the hated tracking cookie consent pop-up?”
Nov 5
An oral history of Bank Python calpaterson.com · “Dagger is a key technology to get financial models out of Excel, into a programming language and under tests and version control.”
Nov 4
Why is Excalidraw so good? offbyone.us · “If you don’t know what something is, you can learn it in about 12 seconds.”
Nov 4
These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops wired.co.uk · “The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition.”
Nov 4
Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places strongtowns.org · “In fact, our shortage of nice places is almost totally self-imposed.”
Nov 4
Thank you, GitHub github.blog · “I will become Chairman Emeritus, which fulfills my lifelong ambition of having a title in Latin.”
Nov 3
How to build your own CNC machine from scratch github.com · “This guide goes through all the steps to build your own CNC machine from scratch.”
Nov 3
Reporter who notified Missouri officials of website flaw did 'nothing out of line,' emails show statescoop.com · “But rather than thank Renaud, Gov. Mike Parson responded Oct. 14 with accusations that the Post-Dispatch had “hacked” the state government as part of a perceived “political vendetta” against his administration.”
Nov 3
Organ transplant patients (maybe) don't get dementia. Here's why. trevorklee.com · “As you can see, dementia is almost absent in the calcineurin inhibitor group.”
Nov 3
Curves and Surfaces ciechanow.ski · “From fonts to animated movies, curves and surfaces constitute fundamental building blocks of many geometrical designs.”
Nov 2
Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation blog.danslimmon.com · “A do-nothing script is a script that encodes the instructions of a slog, encapsulating each step in a function.”
Nov 2
Research: People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency binghamton.edu · “People may be willing to sacrifice a bit in terms of performance in order to have a really positive team experience.”
Nov 2
Zoom Supports Continued Access for Basic Users with Advertising Program blog.zoom.us · “For this initial program, ads will be rolled out only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting.”
Nov 2
'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code krebsonsecurity.com · “This vulnerability is, as far as I know, the first one to affect almost everything.”
Nov 1
Meet skimpflation: A reason inflation is worse than the government says it is npr.org · “It’s when, instead of simply raising prices, companies skimp on the goods and services they provide.”
Nov 1
Developer Tools secrets that shouldn't be secrets christianheilmann.com · “The first problem is log messages that aren’t removed when a product goes live clogging up the Console.”
Nov 1
UF professors denied permission to testify in voting rights case npr.org · “Responding to McDonald and Austin’s request to testify, the university said that “litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests,” according to the documents the plaintiffs filed Friday.”
Nov 1

October 2021 125 posts

Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open robertheaton.com · “Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy?”
Oct 31
Avoiding bot detection: How to scrape the web without getting blocked? github.com · “The IP pool is mainly sourced from users of HolaVPN and an app monetization SDK.”
Oct 31
It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is pluralistic.net · “It’s run by an oligopoly of wildly profitable companies that coerce academics into working for free for them, and then sell the product of their labors back to the academics’ employers (often public institutions) for eye-popping sums.”
Oct 31
Why the status quo is so hard to change in engineering teams okayhq.com · “A set of behaviors where we give up on escaping a painful situation, because our brain has gradually been taught to assume powerlessness in that situation.”
Oct 31
Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's groups.csail.mit.edu · “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all.”
Oct 30
Switching the Linux graphics stack from GLX to EGL mozillagfx.wordpress.com · “In the upcoming Firefox 94 release we will enable the EGL backend for a big group of our Linux users.”
Oct 30
Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets up to 60% GPU performance boost cnx-software.com · “Khronos has just granted Vulkan 1.1 conformance to Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, and following the implementation of various optimizations and new features such as geometry shaders, the v3dv Mesa driver delivers up to 60% higher GPU performance in Unreal Engine 4.”
Oct 30
Async Ruby brunosutic.com · “Async Ruby adds new concurrency features to the language; you can think of it as "threads with none of the downsides".”
Oct 30
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California (again!) signal.org · “It’s impossible to turn over data that we never had access to in the first place.”
Oct 29
Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm independent.com · “The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.”
Oct 29
Oculus Quest is Getting Rid of Facebook Account Requirement gamerant.com · “During the recent Facebook outage, certain Oculus devices were effectively rendered useless due to their inability to connect to the larger Facebook platform.”
Oct 29
Financial innovations brought by technology bam.kalzumeus.com · “Free checking wasn’t free.”
Oct 29
55 GiB/s FizzBuzz codegolf.stackexchange.com · “In particular, it’s faster than memcpy, which presents interesting challenges when it comes to I/O (if you try to output using write then the copies in write will take up almost all the runtime – replacing the I/O routine here with write causes the performance on my CPU to drop by a factor of 5).”
Oct 28
Open secrets about Hacker News bengtan.com · “One of them can triple the chances of a story reaching the front page.”
Oct 28
New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15 raspberrypi.com · “Priced at $15, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.”
Oct 28
An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach thezvi.wordpress.com · “There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.”
Oct 28
New MacBook Pro has first 'DIY-friendly' battery replacement design since 2012 ifixit.com · “The wind carries a whisper of three words, a faint utterance that makes our hair stand on end: battery pull tabs.”
Oct 27
Female African Elephants Are Evolving Without Tusks Due to Ivory Poaching theswaddle.com · “Researchers found the number of tuskless female elephants in Mozambique increased by almost double over 30 years.”
Oct 27
Giant, free index to world's research papers released online nature.com · “Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.”
Oct 27
Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners, study finds techspot.com · “NBER found that the top 10 percent of mining operations control around 90 percent of the Bitcoin mining capacity.”
Oct 27
A Patent Troll Backs Off sparkfun.com · “Altair Logix was formed June 12, 2018, or three months after the patent expired on February 27th, 2018.”
Oct 26
Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs' decrypt.co · “Worldcoin, which already touts a $1 billion valuation, aims to onboard more people into crypto by doling out free coins to anyone who scans their eyes on a device called "the Orb" that will convert an image of your eyes into "short numeric code" to check whether you already have Worldcoins.”
Oct 26
Next.js 12 nextjs.org · “Our Rust compiler is built on SWC, an open platform for the next generation of fast tooling.”
Oct 26
Privacy is a Human Right blog.torproject.org · “Privacy is about protecting what makes us humans: our day-to-day behavior, our personality, our fears, our relationships, and our vulnerabilities.”
Oct 26
Here's the FBI's Internal Guide for Getting Data from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon vice.com · “The document, a 139 page slide presentation dated 2019, is written by the FBI’s Cellular Analysis Survey Team (CAST).”
Oct 25
Government orders Google to track anyone searching certain names, addresses, and phone numbers dailymail.co.uk · “The U.S. government is using ‘keyword warrants’ to uncover the identity of anyone who searches Google and other search engines for certain search terms that may be related to a crime, according to a new report.”
Oct 25
Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility github.com · “Kerla is a monolithic operating system kernel written from scratch in Rust which aims to be compatible with the Linux ABI, that is, it runs Linux binaries without any modifications.”
Oct 25
Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip blog.yiningkarlli.com · “Apple reached out to me last week immediately after the announcement of the new MacBook Pros, and as a result, for the past week I’ve had the opportunity to use a prerelease M1 Max-equipped 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro as my daily computer.”
Oct 25
Breaking the News: New York Times Journalist Ben Hubbard Hacked with Pegasus After Reporting on Previous Hacking Attempts citizenlab.ca · “New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard was repeatedly targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware over a three-year period from June 2018 to June 2021.”
Oct 24
Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker borncity.com · “David Xanatos has pointed out to me that Microsoft is refusing to sign drivers for the new Process Hacker without giving any further reason.”
Oct 24
How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 kwcodes.com · “We spent more than one year building it after work and over the weekends.”
Oct 24
Proton wins appeal in Swiss court over surveillance laws swissinfo.ch · “A Swiss court has upheld the appeal of Geneva-based Proton, a provider of secure and anonymous email services, limiting its obligation to monitor traffic and retain data for surveillance purposes.”
Oct 24
Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy theregister.com · “Several years ago, to deal with the competitive threat of header bidding – a way for multiple ad exchanges to get a fair shot at winning an automated auction for ad space – Google allegedly hatched a plan called "Jedi" to ensure that its ad exchange always won.”
Oct 23
Leaving Google jayconrod.com · “My last manager had around 25 reports.”
Oct 23
Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot - Less Than 2 Seconds furkantokac.com · “In the end, we will have a RPI that boots from power-up to Linux shell in 1.75 seconds, power-up to Qt (QML) application in 2.82 seconds.”
Oct 23
Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? dusted.codes · “Well, someone at Microsoft who wields great power has made the decision that features such as hot reload cannot be given away for free as part of the open source .NET SDK anymore.”
Oct 23
Magit, the magical Git interface emacsair.me · “Current GUIs only expose a limited subset of Git’s features, while Magit is an essentially complete interface.”
Oct 22
Police Can't Demand You Reveal Your Phone Passcode and Then Tell a Jury You Refused eff.org · “The State cannot compel a suspect to recall and share information that exists only in his mind.”
Oct 22
Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2021 edition itvision.altervista.org · “I want to make one thing crystal clear - Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it has its own share of critical problems.”
Oct 22
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream filfre.net · “Harlan Ellison made a very successful career out of biting the hands that fed him.”
Oct 22
Willingness to look stupid danluu.com · “The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I’ve observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time.”
Oct 21
Beyond Smart paulgraham.com · “There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.”
Oct 21
Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks, restrict trading following controversy cnbc.com · “Officials will be restricted primarily to owning mutual funds, which they will have to hold for a year and will need permission to buy or sell.”
Oct 21
Announcing Rust 1.56.0 and Rust 2021 blog.rust-lang.org · “Editions are a mechanism for opt-in changes that may otherwise pose backwards compatibility risk.”
Oct 21
vscode.dev(!) code.visualstudio.com · “Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you’ll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser.”
Oct 20
Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser brave.com · “Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported.”
Oct 20
Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021 nature.com · “Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in ad 1021.”
Oct 20
We Analyzed 425,909 Favicons iconmap.io · “Discord’s favicon is a 280k monster.”
Oct 20
FDA moves to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter npr.org · “People with mild or moderate hearing loss could soon be able to buy hearing aids without a medical exam or special fitting, under a new rule being proposed by the Food and Drug Administration.”
Oct 19
Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined spectrum.ieee.org · “Battery companies still hesitate to use recycled material in their batteries.”
Oct 19
Why I Hate Frameworks fredrikholmqvist.com · “Nobody really buys hammers anymore.”
Oct 19
Hindenburg Research Announces $1,000,000 Bounty For Details On Tether's Backing hindenburgresearch.com · “Despite multiple regulatory sanctions over its alleged lack of truthful disclosure about its reserves, and despite Tether now having a $70 billion market cap, Tether still refuses to provide transparency to the public on its holdings.”
Oct 19
Introducing M1 Pro and M1 Max: the most powerful chips Apple has ever built apple.com · “M1 Max is the largest chip Apple has ever built: 57 billion transistors and up to 64GB of fast unified memory.”
Oct 18
AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go swyx.io · “By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object Storage service that directly takes aim at AWS’ "Hotel California" business model.”
Oct 18
YouTube: Filmmakers Presumed Guilty Until (Maybe) Proven Innocent larryjordan.com · “Note that Anthony has to appeal the take-down notice NOT to an unbiased third-party, but to the person making the original claim.”
Oct 18
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks cnbc.com · “The top 1% gained more than $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the bottom 90% added $1.2 trillion, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.”
Oct 18
136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling baldurbjarnason.com · “Most software projects consume 5x, 10x, 20x more resources than they should because failure demand consumes most of the organisation’s resources.”
Oct 17
L0phtCrack Is Now Open Source l0phtcrack.gitlab.io · “It has been repossessed by the previous owners, formerly known as L0pht Holdings, LLC for Terahash defaulting on the installment sale loan.”
Oct 17
42 years later, how 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' has endured npr.org · “And 42 is now the number of years since the publication of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the first in the series of wacky and beloved sci-fi books by Douglas Adams.”
Oct 17
Web Browser Engineering browser.engineering · “This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python.”
Oct 17
Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink bleepingcomputer.com · “As ink is not necessary to perform scans or faxes, the argument is that the printer features should continue to work even if there is no ink in the device.”
Oct 16
'Dislike' button would improve Spotify's recommendations news.cornell.edu · “But Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song?”
Oct 16
Wearable Microphone Jamming sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu · “We engineered a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling microphones in its user’s surroundings, including hidden microphones.”
Oct 16
Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes theguardian.com · “Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries.”
Oct 16
A viable solution for Python concurrency lwn.net · “Replacing Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF with atomic variants would result in a 60% average slowdown on the pyperformance benchmark suite.”
Oct 15
PinePhone Pro pine64.org · “Hardware privacy dip switches for the cameras, the microphone, WiFi & BT, headphone jack (enabling UART) and the LTE modem (including GPS) are accessible under the back cover, just as on the original PinePhone.”
Oct 15
Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam, Epic will try to make it work theverge.com · “Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won’t be allowed on Steam, according to a rule added to Valve’s "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam" list.”
Oct 15
Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity danluu.com · “I certainly agree that working on the right thing is important, but increasing velocity doesn’t stop you from working on the right thing.”
Oct 15
Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting Security Vulnerability krebsonsecurity.com · “The newspaper said it found that teachers’ Social Security numbers were contained in the HTML source code of the pages involved.”
Oct 14
Apple joins Blender Development Fund blender.org · “Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to the Blender HQ and development community to help support Blender artists and developers.”
Oct 14
What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 jacobian.org · “There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries (e.g. Radford), but employees don’t.”
Oct 14
How to win at CORS jakearchibald.com · “It’s hard because it’s part of how browsers fetch stuff, and that’s a set of behaviours that started with the very first web browser over thirty years ago.”
Oct 14
Apple silently fixes iOS zero-day, asks bug reporter to keep quiet bleepingcomputer.com · “The company addressed the bug without acknowledging or crediting software developer Denis Tokarev for the discovery even though he reported the flaw seven months before iOS 15.0.2 was released.”
Oct 13
How APT does its fancy progress bar mdk.fr · “Today while running an apt full-upgrade I asked myself how apt does this nice progress bar stuck at the bottom line while still writing scrolling text.”
Oct 13
What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam? sparktoro.com · “In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales.”
Oct 13
The 100 MHz 6502 e-basteln.de · “Inside the FPGA, the CPU core runs at 100 MHz.”
Oct 13
Kape Technologies (Formerly Crossrider) Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN "Review" Websites restoreprivacy.com · “Kape Technologies (formerly Crossrider) has now acquired four different VPN services and a collection of VPN "review" websites that rank Kape’s VPN holdings at the top of their recommendations.”
Oct 13
IoT Hacking and Rickrolling My High School District whitehoodhacker.net · “I did it by hijacking every networked display in every school to broadcast "Never Gonna Give You Up" in perfect synchronization.”
Oct 12
3 TypeScript Tricks I wish I knew when I learned TypeScript cstrnt.dev · “I think this is some kind of false security because you expect things to just work.”
Oct 12
Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition' triggered in a lab imperial.ac.uk · “This has produced more energy than any previous inertial confinement fusion experiment, and proves ignition is possible, paving the way for reactions that produce more energy than they need to get started.”
Oct 12
Woman rocked awake by meteorite chunk crashing into her bedroom cbc.ca · “A charcoal-grey chunk of rock roughly the size of a melon had plummeted from space, tearing through Hamilton’s roof before coming to rest on her floral pillowcase, inches from where her head had been moments earlier.”
Oct 12
I keep making things out of checkboxes bryanbraun.com · “Something happened earlier this year where I got on a run making checkbox animations and just couldn’t stop.”
Oct 11
Android Mobile OS Snooping By Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme Handsets scss.tcd.ie · “There is no opt out from this data collection.”
Oct 11
Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely, indefinitely seattletimes.com · “That’s a change from Amazon’s previous expectation that most employees would need to be in the office at least three days a week once offices reopen in January.”
Oct 11
Peter Norvig: Today's Most Pressing Questions in AI Are Human-Centered hai.stanford.edu · “Now that we have a great set of algorithms and tools, the more pressing questions are human-centered: Exactly what do you want to optimize?”
Oct 11
China again blocks Wikimedia Foundation's accreditation to World Intellectual Property Organization wikimediafoundation.org · “China was again the only country to object to the accreditation of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official observer.”
Oct 10
Which Version of JDK Should I Use? whichjdk.com · “These distributions differ in licenses, commercial support, supported platforms, and update frequency.”
Oct 10
Classified tank specs leaked on War Thunder game forums – again ukdefencejournal.org.uk · “A French Army tank crewman has leaked a portion of the Leclerc Main Battle Tank’s classified manual on the forum for popular online game War Thunder, the second time a leak of tank specifications has happened.”
Oct 10
SerenityOS: Year 3 in review serenityos.org · “The project aims to build everything in-house instead of relying on third-party libraries.”
Oct 10
The American Bumblebee Has Nearly Vanished From Eight States smithsonianmag.com · “The bumblebee species have declined by 99 percent in New York.”
Oct 9
O&O ShutUp10++: Free antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11 oo-software.com · “Some services log all your keystrokes, share your Wi-Fi access data with your Facebook contacts, or connect your computer to a public and potentially unsecured network without asking.”
Oct 9
ScummVM 2.5.0: Twenty years ago today... scummvm.org · “Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project.”
Oct 9
Real-world data show that filters clean COVID-causing virus from air nature.com · “The results suggest that air filters could be used to reduce the risk of patients and medical staff contracting SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals, the study’s authors say.”
Oct 9
20 Things I've Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer simplethread.com · “We should be far more concerned with keeping 0.1x programmers off our teams than finding the mythical 10x programmer.”
Oct 8
How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha robmensching.com · “Now the .NET Foundation wants me to comply with some new policies that I’ve never heard of, let alone agreed to.”
Oct 8
Ireland joins OECD International Tax agreement gov.ie · “This 15% rate will apply to 56 Irish multinationals employing approximately 100,000 people, and 1500 foreign owned MNEs based in Ireland employed approximately 400,000 people.”
Oct 8
Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines github.com · “quickget automatically downloads the ISO image for the operating system you want to run and creates a configuration file for the virtual machine.”
Oct 8
Facebook banned me for life because I help people use it less slate.com · “It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts.”
Oct 7
Bitcoin is a Ponzi ic.unicamp.br · “Thus the investors, as a whole, are always in the red, and their collective loss only increases with time.”
Oct 7
Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl libc project andrewkelley.me · “musl is such a high quality codebase, that most of the Zig standard library’s interface to Linux is a direct port of musl code.”
Oct 7
Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months mbuffett.com · “So I wasted countless hours, all the while thinking I was going to be great at chess when I started playing again, because I had such a killer puzzle rating.”
Oct 7
The entirety of Twitch has reportedly been leaked videogameschronicle.com · “VGC can verify that the files mentioned on 4chan are publicly available to download as described by the anonymous hacker.”
Oct 6
Account deletion within apps required starting January 31 developer.apple.com · “The updates to App Store Review Guideline 5.1.1 last June provided users with greater control over their personal data, stating that all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to initiate deletion of their account from within the app.”
Oct 6
Herding elephants: Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion notion.so · “Realizing that TXID wraparound would pose an existential threat to the product, our infrastructure team doubled down and got to work.”
Oct 6
Moving Google toward the mainline lwn.net · “One of the big problems with Prodkernel is that it detracts from upstream participation, he said.”
Oct 6
Facebook whistleblower renews scrutiny of the social media giant npr.org · “Haugen’s planned testimony this week, as well as the information she shared so far, suggests the company deceived the public and its investors about its ability to deal with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.”
Oct 5
The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics axisofordinary.substack.com · “Knowing just slightly more about the value of your car than a potential buyer can make it impossible to sell it”
Oct 5
Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? arxiv.org · “It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.”
Oct 5
Open Source Tax Software ctskennerton.github.io · “The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to get you to pay for it and upsell you on something that should be free.”
Oct 5
Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the Internet blog.cloudflare.com · “At 15:58 UTC we noticed that Facebook had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes.”
Oct 4
It takes a PhD to develop that blog.royalsloth.eu · “As embarrassing as this is for Microsoft, which despite owning the platform and its APIs still struggle to produce a reasonably performing software, I think part of the problem is simply caused by the corporate incentives.”
Oct 4
Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge ctrl.blog · “It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.”
Oct 4
Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum privacyaffairs.com · “It’s alleged that the data was obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by users.”
Oct 4
Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful theguardian.com · “Branded the Pandora papers, the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”
Oct 3
MagInkCal: E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi github.com · “I’m getting around 3-4 weeks before needing to recharge the PiSugar2.”
Oct 3
New study reveals iPhones aren't as private as you think tomsguide.com · “Much of this data collection takes place after the phone is first turned on, before the user logs into an Apple or Google account, and even when all optional data-sharing settings are disabled.”
Oct 3
A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean has reached the Southern California coast npr.org · “More than 120,000 gallons of oil that spilled into the Pacific Ocean has reached the Southern California coastline, closing parts of the beach as officials warn residents to stay away from the slick.”
Oct 3
Gentle introduction to GPUs inner workings vksegfault.github.io · “Well, this might be a surprise for many, but so-called cores in GPUs world are more of a marketing term.”
Oct 2
Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill theguardian.com · “None of the companies contacted by the Guardian would rebuke the stance of the lobby groups they are part of and none said they would review their links to these groups.”
Oct 2
Ransomware gangs are complaining that other crooks are stealing their ransoms zdnet.com · “One forum user claimed to have had suspicions of REvil’s tactics, and said their own plans to extort $7 million from a victim was abruptly ended.”
Oct 2
A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 blog.chriszacharias.com · “At least one to two weeks every major sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking in IE6.”
Oct 2
NFT Projects are just MLMs for Tech Elites every.to · “We posit that the most prominent NFT projects, things like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Pudgy Penguins, hold such a remarkably similar structure to Multi-Level-Marketing companies (MLMs) that they will also suffer from the same failures.”
Oct 1
A world first: Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane noaa.gov · “SD1045 is battling 50 foot waves and winds of over 120 mph to collect critical scientific data and, in the process, is giving us a completely new view of one of earth’s most destructive forces.”
Oct 1
DeFi protocol Compound mistakenly gives away $90 million to users cnbc.com · “About $90.1 million has mistakenly gone out to users of popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, after an upgrade gone epically wrong.”
Oct 1
'Google' is most searched word on Bing, Google says bbc.com · “Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google to rival search engines.”
Oct 1

September 2021 120 posts

PostgreSQL 14 Released! postgresql.org · “PostgreSQL 14 provides a significant throughput boost on workloads that use many connections, with some benchmarks showing a 2x speedup.”
Sep 30
Understanding AWK earthly.dev · “It turns out Awk is pretty simple.”
Sep 30
Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off naehrdine.blogspot.com · “This way, a processor that is always on actually saves energy.”
Sep 30
Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences? floverfelt.org · “Software Engineering is really frustrating because there’s basically never a “right” answer and so most decisions come down to “whatever the senior engineer wants.””
Sep 30
Bracket pair colorization 10,000x faster code.visualstudio.com · “During these 10 seconds of processing, the extension host process burns at 100% CPU and all features that are powered by extensions, such as auto-completion or diagnostics, stop functioning.”
Sep 29
In 2019, Almost All of Facebook's Top Christian Pages Were Run By Foreign Troll Farms relevantmagazine.com · “In 2019, 19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms overseas, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal.”
Sep 29
Apple AirTag Bug Enables ‘Good Samaritan’ Attack krebsonsecurity.com · “The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode.”
Sep 29
Local First / Offline First rxdb.info · “Local-First (aka offline first) is a software paradigm where the software stores data locally on the client’s device and must work as well offline as it does online.”
Sep 29
You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation mux.com · “It’s the dirty little product secret that no one talks about.”
Sep 28
Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees blog.cloudflare.com · “Traditional object storage charges developers for three things: bandwidth, storage size and storage operations.”
Sep 28
As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow theregister.com · “Thereafter, only Manifest V3 extensions will be supported in Chrome, a change that critics fear will hobble the add-ons and make them little more than toys.”
Sep 28
The code worked differently when the moon was full hanselman.com · “The whole period of square wave sounds an awful lot like it is around 49.7 days.”
Sep 28
Something Weird Is Happening on Facebook politicalorphans.com · “Many of these posts look like they’re probing for answers to security/verification questions, but the ugly reality is that your passwords are nearly worthless.”
Sep 27
I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2 operand.ca · “I never thought I could cause a system to reboot by copying over /lib files, but now I know you can.”
Sep 27
What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos 3quarksdaily.com · “He visited as a consultant a few times a year.”
Sep 27
What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD) verraes.net · “That makes DDD notoriously hard to define.”
Sep 27
Congratulations, Mini, You Made The Stupidest Turn Signals Ever jalopnik.com · “These signals are showing a right-pointing arrow blinking on the left side, and a left-pointing arrow blinking on the right.”
Sep 26
Designing Low Upkeep Software jefftk.com · “The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them to ones that value backwards compatibility.”
Sep 26
The Problem of Marital Loneliness newyorker.com · “The very closeness of marriage makes every bit of distance palpable.”
Sep 26
In 1973, I invented a ‘girly drink’ called Baileys irishtimes.com · “On December 3rd, 2007, Diageo announced the sale of the billionth bottle of Baileys since it was first introduced in 1973.”
Sep 26
Demonopolizing the internet with interoperability pluralistic.net · “A rule that requires Big Tech to throw everything at unsolvable problems will make the cost of entry into the tech sector so expensive that Big Tech will get to rule unchallenged, forever.”
Sep 25
The Dead Code Diaries madned.substack.com · “The mystery program was my own, and I had no specific memory of writing it.”
Sep 25
Why data scientists shouldn’t need to know Kubernetes huyenchip.com · “Many companies expect data scientists to be full-stack, which includes knowing lower-level infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes (K8s) and resource management.”
Sep 25
I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto schneier.com · “I would have drafted a paper, showed it to a lot of smart people, and improved it based on their comments.”
Sep 25
Disclosure of three 0-day iOS vulnerabilities and critique of Apple Security Bounty program habr.com · “There were three releases since then and they broke their promise each time.”
Sep 24
New tool: an nginx playground jvns.ca · “And nginx in particular is EXTREMELY finicky to configure, so I think it’s extra important to have a playground for nginx to quickly test things out.”
Sep 24
This Is All Exactly What It Looks Like defector.com · “The discourse around it is absolutely catastrophic, just disastrously obnoxious and dishonest and stilted at every turn, but that is generally true when it comes to conversations about money.”
Sep 24
AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules bbc.com · “Mr Thaler filed two patent applications in 2018, one for a type of food container and one for a flashing light.”
Sep 24
The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous vice.com · “The IC, which also includes the parts of the FBI, DEA, and DHS, and various DoD elements, has deployed ad-blocking technology on a wide scale, according to a copy of a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.”
Sep 23
Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account, but Epic’s Other Developer Accounts Remain Active daringfireball.net · “That doesn’t sound like the words of a man poised to comply with the App Store rules around in-app purchases.”
Sep 23
No, We Won’t Have a Video Call for That! xahteiwi.eu · “Effective distributed collaboration is not pretending to be in an office while staring into a webcam all day.”
Sep 23
Authenticated Boot and Disk Encryption on Linux 0pointer.net · “In fact, right now, your data is probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or MacOS devices, than it is on typical Linux distributions.”
Sep 23
How We Got to LiveView fly.io · “LiveView strips away layers of abstraction, because it solves both the client and server in a single abstraction.”
Sep 22
The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start without Machine Learning eugeneyan.com · “If you think that machine learning will give you a 100% boost, then a heuristic will get you 50% of the way there.”
Sep 22
A different kind of keyboard ianthehenry.com · “Peggi is an eight-key keyboard that fits on the back of your phone.”
Sep 22
It's tough being an Azure fan alexhudson.com · “However, these vulnerabilities are dreadful.”
Sep 22
The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever used pluralistic.net · “I’ve bought a new Thinkpad almost every year since 2006.”
Sep 21
TikTokers Are Trading Stocks By Copying What Members Of Congress Do text.npr.org · “Last year, Josephs noticed that the trades, actually made by Pelosi’s investor husband and merely disclosed by the speaker, were performing well.”
Sep 21
That Time I Told My Wife I Wanted to Quit My Job keygen.sh · “At the time, my side project, now a side business, was making about half of what my senior software engineer position at $CRYPTO_EXCHANGE was netting me, before theft taxes.”
Sep 21
More Casio Watch Mods n-o-d-e.net · “One day I decided to see what the kapton tape I use for my 3D printer bed looks like when applied to the display, and to my surprise it turned out great, transforming the boring regular LCD into a nice amber color.”
Sep 21
Google Docs in a clean-room browser ekioh.com · “Like Google Mail, Google Docs almost entirely consists of obfuscated JavaScript, some of it common between the two.”
Sep 20
There are six internet links on my office on wheels. Seven when Starlink arrives. Is this the best internet in Australia? ghuntley.com · “There are three mobile phone carriers in Australia.”
Sep 20
As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support, and this is what happened plumshell.com · “This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.”
Sep 20
FBI says fortune seized in Beverly Hills raid was criminals’ loot. Owners say: Where’s the proof? latimes.com · “But six months after the raid, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have produced no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the vast majority of box holders whose belongings the government is trying to keep.”
Sep 20
Spy tech that followed kids home for remote learning the74million.org · “Over the next six months, Matlock got nearly 1,300 similar emails from Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts.”
Sep 19
Russia restricts opposition election voting app from Apple App Store and Google Play Store netblocks.org · “On Friday, sources confirmed on background that at least one of the U.S.-based companies implementing the restriction felt compelled to comply for fear that local staff could face legal action upon receipt of a takedown order from the Russian Federation.”
Sep 19
Why the University of Florida gets a ~$20m cut of Gatorade profits every year thehustle.co · “The trust then sends 20% to the university, which employed the professor who invented the drink nearly 60 years ago.”
Sep 19
The physics anomaly no one talks about: What’s up with those neutrinos? backreaction.blogspot.com · “That’s a 20 years old anomaly in neutrino physics which has been above the discovery threshold since 2018, but chances are you’ve never even heard of it.”
Sep 19
How To Rapidly Improve At Any Programming Language cbui.dev · “In the open source world, you can generally take your time to get things right.”
Sep 18
Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud theverge.com · “Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts, the company confirms to The Verge.”
Sep 18
No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? spiegel.de · “New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.”
Sep 18
What I Learnt Becoming a Tech Lead tomgamon.com · “On the above, the amount of code I write day to day is way less than I thought it would be.”
Sep 18
Mailchimp Insiders React to Employees Getting No Equity From Intuit Sale businessinsider.com · “When employees were recruited to work at Mailchimp there was a common refrain from hiring managers: No, you are not going to get equity, but you will get to be part of a scrappy company that fights for the little guy and we will never be acquired or go public.”
Sep 17
LN 001: Composing application interfaces alexanderobenauer.com · “You don’t have to worry about piping data around your app, syncing, binding state to interface components, etc.”
Sep 17
Life-Size Camel Sculptures in Saudi Arabia Are Older Than Stonehenge, Pyramids of Giza smithsonianmag.com · “Now, a new study suggests that this proposed timeframe was off by as much as 6,000 years.”
Sep 17
Intersection geometry - A/B Street a-b-street.github.io · “Some of the things in A/B Street that seem the simplest have taken tremendous effort.”
Sep 17
Marginalia Search search.marginalia.nu · “Don’t be afraid to scroll down in the search results, unlike in many other search engines, depending on what you are looking for, you may find the best results in the middle of the listing.”
Sep 16
Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81 theguardian.com · “Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models.”
Sep 16
Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord kotaku.com · “Readers are then urged to move to the site’s Discord, because of course they would be.”
Sep 16
The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history theguardian.com · “Google revealed for the first time in August that it received 11,554 geofence location warrants from law enforcement agencies in 2020, up from 8,396 in 2019 and 982 in 2018.”
Sep 16
Apple blocked the FlickType Watch keyboard... then announced a clone of it inputmag.com · “A separate version for the Apple Watch would remain, but then Apple pulled that one as well, telling Eleftheriou that keyboards aren’t allowed on the Apple Watch.”
Sep 15
The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense erichgrunewald.com · “There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language.”
Sep 15
Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS joshwcomeau.com · “The web is covered in fuzzy grey boxes that don’t really look much like shadows.”
Sep 15
Why Authorization is Hard osohq.com · “There’s a fundamental tension in authorization.”
Sep 15
Apple co-founder announces private space company to clean up the space debris clogging the planet independent.co.uk · “Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is starting a private space company called Privateer.”
Sep 14
Stripe Banned Us for Payment Disputes but We Never had a Dispute justuseapp.com · “Throughout our 3 months on Stripe, we have only had one dispute on Stripe for a $10 charge which we won easily after submitting evidence to J.P Morgan (the user’s bank).”
Sep 14
How Percentiles Work (and Why They're Better Than Averages) blog.timescale.com · “Since a normal distribution is often one of the first things we learn, we (myself included!) can think it applies to more cases than it actually does.”
Sep 14
Intel Is Reducing Server Chip Pricing in Attempt to Stem the AMD Tide: Report tomshardware.com · “However, it’s noteworthy that Intel hasn’t changed its official recommended pricing, so these deals are likely coming as part of volume purchases with its largest customers.”
Sep 14
FORCEDENTRY: NSO Group iMessage Zero-Click Exploit Captured in the Wild citizenlab.ca · “While analyzing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage.”
Sep 13
Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows theverge.com · “Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.”
Sep 13
Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules nltimes.nl · “For example, a driver may only refuse a few trips before being logged out by the system.”
Sep 13
Disclosing CVE-2021-40823 and CVE-2021-40824: E2EE vulnerability in multiple Matrix clients matrix.org · “Thus, the greatest risk is to users who are in encrypted rooms containing malicious servers.”
Sep 13
Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented smithsonianmag.com · “It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production.”
Sep 12
Two new color spaces for color picking - Okhsv and Okhsl bottosson.github.io · “Despite color picking playing a big role in a lot of applications, the design of color pickers isn’t a particularly well researched topic.”
Sep 12
Fossil Fuel Capitalism Is Cutting Our Lives Short tribunemag.co.uk · “Air pollution is killing people around the world on average 2.2 years early, according to a new report.”
Sep 12
The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon torrentfreak.com · “The torrent was created in September 2003, which means that it will turn 18 this month.”
Sep 12
No More Medium. Build Your Own Site, Please. nomedium.dev · “Medium’s paywall is an insult to good journalism by forcing specific users to pay for content of often questionable quality.”
Sep 11
Mistakes I've Made in AWS laravel-news.com · “Other than occasionally deleting production data, the mistakes all arose from ignorance - there’s so much to know about AWS that it’s easy to miss something important.”
Sep 11
Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? subconscious.substack.com · “The web wasn’t great, but it was networked.”
Sep 11
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers nature.com · “Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.”
Sep 11
Apple must allow other forms of in-app purchase, rules judge in Epic v. Apple theverge.com · “In short, iOS apps must be allowed to direct users to payment options beyond those offered by Apple.”
Sep 10
Revealed: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers across dozens of countries theguardian.com · “Google has been illegally underpaying thousands of temporary workers in dozens of countries and delayed correcting the pay rates for more than two years as it attempted to cover up the problem, the Guardian can reveal.”
Sep 10
Write more, but shorter blog.kewah.com · “By writing shorter content, I’ll reduce my expectation on how long an article should be before publishing it.”
Sep 10
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea blog.garrytan.com · “Yahoo keeps it around because it’s fantastic for recruiting.”
Sep 10
Hong Kong: Police raid Tiananmen Square museum bbc.co.uk · “The national security unit had earlier requested that the Hong Kong Alliance hand over information, reportedly including personal details of all members since the group’s founding and financial records.”
Sep 9
~60x speed-up of Linux "perf" eighty-twenty.org · “What used to take endless minutes now takes a few seconds.”
Sep 9
A Single Laser Fired Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything Inside a Room gizmodo.com · “But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have expanded on a technique called non-line-of-sight imaging so that just a single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.”
Sep 9
New Math Book Rescues Landmark Topology Proof quantamagazine.org · “Today, few mathematicians understand what he did, and those who do are aging out of the field.”
Sep 9
MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy news.mit.edu · “That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).”
Sep 8
Monitoring my home's air quality (CO2, PM2.5, Temp/Humidity) with AirGradient's DIY sensor jeffgeerling.com · “I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home’s CO2 levels, but the high price and limited ‘ownership’ of the data coming from it turned me off.”
Sep 8
20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking off our shoes at airports? ocregister.com · “Sorry travelers, it looks like the body scans and shoe removal are here to stay.”
Sep 8
Maintain it With Zig kristoff.it · “Learning how to contribute to a popular FOSS C/C++ project is not easy for a new developer.”
Sep 8
My £4 a month server can handle 4.2 million requests a day mark.mcnally.je · “These benchmarks show that a very cheap server can easily handle 50 requests a second to a “full stack” website.”
Sep 7
Australia's new mass surveillance mandate digitalrightswatch.org.au · “The Australian government has new laws on the books to hack your computer, your online accounts, and just about any piece of technology and networks you come into contact with.”
Sep 7
ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested theregister.com · “ProtonMail responded to this request by providing the IP address and the fingerprint of the browser used by the collective.”
Sep 7
'Red Roulette' Reveals The Inside Of China's Wealth-Making Machine npr.org · “The government never acknowledged they have taken her.”
Sep 7
Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of software updates xda-developers.com · “In addition, the Federal Government wants OEMs to publish the spare part prices and not increase them over time.”
Sep 6
US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluence vulnerability 'ongoing and expected to accelerate' zdnet.com · “The vulnerability only affects customers of the Confluence Server and Data Center products.”
Sep 6
ZFS Is Mysteriously Eating My CPU brendangregg.com · “But this was after randomly selecting a zero-sized list, using a CPU-expensive random number generator.”
Sep 6
Chia Coin Miners Are Reselling Used SSDs as New tomshardware.com · “According to a report from VNExpress, some miners are now dumping drives and reselling ‘renewed’ used SSDs as brand new.”
Sep 6
Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods nltimes.nl · “Last year, a third of all homes sold in the four large cities were bought by investors.”
Sep 5
Art Student's 407-Piece Hand-Carved Wooden Clock Literally Writes The Time ablogtowatch.com · “With over 400 moving parts, Suzuki’s senior thesis exhibition project uses four magnetic stylus pens on a magnetic drawing board to mechanically write the full time every minute in 24-hour format – and it is a work of art.”
Sep 5
Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action nature.com · “Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling- and unable-conditions.”
Sep 5
Incident: China Airlines A333 at Taipei on Jun 14th 2020, all primary computers, reversers and autobrakes failed on touchdown avherald.com · “The crew applied maximum manual braking and managed to stop the aircraft 10 meters/33 feet ahead of the runway end (runway length 2600 meters/8530 feet).”
Sep 5
200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor spectrum.ieee.org · “Within a week of publication, Humphry Davy dealt his mentee a devastating blow by accusing Faraday of plagiarism.”
Sep 4
Migrating from Docker to Podman marcusnoble.co.uk · “Docker has recently announced that Docker Desktop will soon require a subscription and, based on the size of your company, may require a paid subscription.”
Sep 4
Writing Well-Documented Code - Learn from Examples codecatalog.org · “The reason we started Code Catalog is because we believe that we can improve our coding skills by reading good code written by others.”
Sep 4
Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know slatestarcodex.com · “Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in.”
Sep 4
Apple Delays Rollout of Controversial Child Safety Features to Make Improvements macrumors.com · “Apple has delayed the rollout of the Child Safety Features that it announced last month following negative feedback, the company has today announced.”
Sep 3
Why can an ad break the Windows 11 desktop and taskbar? ctrl.blog · “Instead, it caused Explorer (the Windows desktop shell) to stop responding and left users without a working Start menu and taskbar.”
Sep 3
Rejected internal applicants twice as likely to quit news.cornell.edu · “Internal job applicants who face rejection are nearly twice as likely to leave their organizations than those who were either hired for an internal job or had not applied for a new job at all.”
Sep 3
Operations is not Developer IT matduggan.com · “The number of times I have sent a full-time Node developer a link to the Node.js docs is too high.”
Sep 3
Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier you can make in 30s dynomight.net · “If you’re in a hurry, this post says that if you strap two HEPA filters to a box fan, it will clear the air of basically all the particles we can measure, and it will do it faster than a commercial filter that costs twice as much.”
Sep 2
Sky Subscribers' Piracy Habits Directly Help Premier League Block Illegal Streams torrentfreak.com · “UK ISP Sky Broadband is monitoring the IP addresses of servers suspected of streaming pirated content to subscribers and supplying that data to an anti-piracy company working with the Premier League.”
Sep 2
Gift Card Gang Extracts Cash From 100k Inboxes Daily krebsonsecurity.com · “Why go after hotel or airline rewards? Because these accounts can all be cleaned out and deposited onto a gift card number that can be resold quickly online for 80 percent of its value.”
Sep 2
WhatsApp Ireland hit with record fine of €225m by DPC rte.ie · “However, eight of around 40 of those authorities disagreed with the draft conclusions, including the DPC’s proposed fine of up to €50m.”
Sep 2
The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Space Flight newyorker.com · “Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson’s hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space.”
Sep 1
Mozilla VPN Completes Independent Security Audit by Cure53 blog.mozilla.org · “During the independent audit, there were two medium and one high severity issues that were discovered.”
Sep 1
The Sacklers, Who Made Billions From OxyContin, Win Immunity From Opioid Lawsuits npr.org · “In return, they have agreed to pay roughly $4.3 billion, while also forfeiting ownership of Purdue Pharma.”
Sep 1
More than 65,000 fake students applied for financial aid in wide community college scam latimes.com · “California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students and said they did not know of any confirmed Cal Grant fraud, but the investigation is continuing.”
Sep 1

August 2021 123 posts

Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares theverge.com · “If tech companies fail to comply with the new law, they could face fines of up to 3 percent of their South Korea revenue.”
Aug 31
58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics plausible.io · “It turns out 58% of Hacker News readers, Reddit users and other techies block Google Analytics.”
Aug 31
Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies theregister.com · “The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop.”
Aug 31
My House carltheperson.com · “Price for the slot was 5,500$ which for a 17-year old was a pretty big investment.”
Aug 31
The open calendar, task and note space is a mess stevenvanbael.com · “To this day I did not succeed in finding a combination that satisfies all my requirements, aside from notes using WebDAV+Joplin.”
Aug 30
Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic apple.com · “Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7.”
Aug 30
Why Facebook is the AOL of 2021 zdnet.com · “Facebook didn’t have to resort to such cheesy tactics, but it similiarly has offered a curated set of free activities that have trapped people inside a walled garden, just like AOL.”
Aug 30
Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware – Part 1 yingtongli.me · “The software became abandonware circa 2009 when it ceased to be offered, and while the software binary has been archived, to date there has been no effort to restore the functionality once available with a free licence.”
Aug 30
Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos news.ycombinator.com · “We’ve built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU.”
Aug 29
How MarkMonitor left >60,000 domains for the taking ian.sh · “MarkMonitor does not have a way of disclosing security issues, which inhibited reporting this to them in a timely manner.”
Aug 29
When a hobby becomes a job vox.com · “Mugs sell, so I make more of them.”
Aug 29
Space Nerds In Space smcameron.github.io · “Space Nerds In Space is an open source (GPLv2) cooperative multiplayer starship simulator for linux (may also work on Mac).”
Aug 29
The Future of discord.py gist.github.com · “I’ve been working on discord.py for about 6 years – a rather significant portion of my life has gone into maintaining this software library completely for free.”
Aug 28
Weird Languages paulgraham.com · “99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions.”
Aug 28
EU agency advises against using search & browsing history for credit scores therecord.media · “The European Union’s lead data protection supervisor has recommended on Thursday that personal data such as search queries & internet browsing history should not be used for the assessment of credit scores and creditworthiness.”
Aug 28
The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D semianalysis.substack.com · “In the new joint venture, Arm Limited, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M.”
Aug 27
Five Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier zwischenzugs.com · “If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you.”
Aug 27
App Store Payments Will Have Increased Competition kalzumeus.com · “To appreciate why, remember that a large share (60% or so) of revenue on the App Store is from games, and game developers are in the business of incentivizing users to take small incremental actions within a play session.”
Aug 27
How does Google Authenticator work? (Part 1) prezu.ca · “Well, so the question becomes: How do we prove the phone contains that static secret (e.g. that password: $3cr3tP4$$) without ever disclosing it?”
Aug 27
The All-Seeing "i": Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy edwardsnowden.substack.com · “Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.”
Aug 26
How I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple markosaric.com · “After using Macs for about fifteen years, I switched to Linux as my main operating system in July of 2018 and I’m enjoying it.”
Aug 26
TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage asia.nikkei.com · “TAIPEI – Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. told clients Wednesday that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company’s steepest single increase.”
Aug 26
canistilluse.com blog.jim-nielsen.com · “When you lookup a certain feature on caniuse.com, there’s an incredible assumption many of us make when interpreting its UI: given enough time, most everything goes green.”
Aug 26
prettymaps: Draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data github.com · “I have closed my other generative art projects on Github and won’t be sharing new ones as open source to protect me from the NFT community.”
Aug 25
Burning out and quitting mayakaczorowski.com · “I was working longer and longer hours, and getting less and less done.”
Aug 25
OnlyFans Drops Planned Porn Ban, Will Continue to Allow Sexually Explicit Content variety.com · “OnlyFans dropped plans to ban pornography from its service, less than a week after the U.K. content-creator subscription site had announced the change citing the need to comply with policies of banking partners.”
Aug 25
Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence theverge.com · “After he went exclusive, that number declined by half to around 2,000, suggesting a drop in listeners.”
Aug 25
Googlespeak™ - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust zyppy.com · “For example, under no circumstances are Googlers to talk about “Market Share.””
Aug 24
The most underused browser feature frankgroeneveld.nl · “I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default.”
Aug 24
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages blog.discord.com · “We decided early on to store all chat history forever so users can come back at any time and have their data available on any device.”
Aug 24
Samsung Supports Retailers Affected By Looting With Innovative Television Block Function news.samsung.com · “TV Block is a security solution that detects if Samsung TV units have been unlawfully activated, and ensures that the television sets can only be used by the rightful owners with a valid proof of purchase.”
Aug 24
A bike parts company ditched Amazon to support indie shops instead theverge.com · “After leaving his job in global business development at Amazon, Aaron Kerson used his knowledge of the platform’s sales algorithms to power up his new business.”
Aug 23
FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine fda.gov · “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine.”
Aug 23
Deno on MDN deno.com · “As of today, Deno compatibility data is also available in these charts.”
Aug 23
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Platforms Want To Be Utilities, Self-Govern Like Empires eff.org · “These services often work great…but they fail very, very badly.”
Aug 23
pam-duress github.com · “A Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) which allows the establishment of alternate passwords that can be used to perform actions to clear sensitive data, notify IT/Security staff, close off sensitive network connections, etc if a user is coerced into giving a threat actor a password.”
Aug 22
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking lithub.com · “Darwin’s best thinking, however, was not done in his study.”
Aug 22
Bigger vehicles are directly resulting in more deaths of people walking smartgrowthamerica.org · “To put it simply, pickup trucks and SUVs are two to three times more likely than smaller personal vehicles to kill people walking in the event of a crash.”
Aug 22
Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands techcrunch.com · “According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020.”
Aug 22
Patterns in confusing explanations jvns.ca · “I came up with a list of 13 patterns that make explanations hard for me to understand.”
Aug 21
EFF Joins Global Coalition Asking Apple CEO Tim Cook to Stop Phone-Scanning eff.org · “EFF has joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and more than 90 other organizations to send a letter urging Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop the company’s plans to weaken privacy and security on Apple’s iPhones and other products.”
Aug 21
An Opinionated Guide to xargs oilshell.org · “It may help to mentally replace xargs with the word each.”
Aug 21
‘I Don’t Want to Be Like a Family With My Co-Workers’ thecut.com · “Recently, however, a friend in my department was told she would not receive a promotion because she is not a “team player.””
Aug 21
A Facebook hacker beat my 2FA, bricked my Oculus Quest, and hit the company credit card codewriteplay.com · “They rejected my appeal at that stage about 18 minutes later.”
Aug 20
Here's another free CA as an alternative to Let's Encrypt! scotthelme.co.uk · “I’m a huge fan of Let’s Encrypt and what they’re doing, but if we want to encrypt the entire Web, we can’t rely and depend on a single organisation to help us do that.”
Aug 20
University Researchers Who Built a CSAM Scanning System Urge Apple to Not Use the 'Dangerous' Technology macrumors.com · “Knowledgeable observers argued a system like ours was far from feasible.”
Aug 20
Tesla is actually going to make a ‘Tesla Bot’ humanoid robot for general purpose use electrek.co · “Tesla announced that it is actually going to make a humanoid robot, called Tesla Bot, and it will be able to grab your groceries for you and perform other menial tasks.”
Aug 20
NeuralHash Collisions: The Limits of Apple’s Image Hashing blog.roboflow.com · “It’s really important that the opposite is also true (two images that are not the same do not have matching NeuralHashes) because otherwise Apple’s system could falsely accuse people of trading in CSAM.”
Aug 19
Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store, Epic filing claims theverge.com · “Google quietly paid game developers hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to keep their games on the Play Store, a newly unredacted complaint from Epic Games in its antitrust suit against Google alleges.”
Aug 19
Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40% bbc.com · “The world’s biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles.”
Aug 19
FTC Alleges Facebook Resorted to Illegal Buy-or-Bury Scheme to Crush Competition After String of Failed Attempts to Innovate ftc.gov · “And to further moat its monopoly, Facebook lured app developers to the platform, surveilled them for signs of success, and then buried them when they became competitive threats.”
Aug 19
Working Collision? github.com · “Can you verify that these two images collide?”
Aug 18
Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do? news.ycombinator.com · “Four months after I published my book, Google created a knowledge panel for me and, because I didn’t have a photo online, they just grabbed a photo of another Andrea Vassell who lives in Canada and displayed it alongside my book and claimed this woman was the author.”
Aug 18
Apple says researchers can vet its child safety features. But it’s suing a startup that does just that. technologyreview.com · “Apple is suing a company that makes software to let security researchers do exactly that.”
Aug 18
How to build your own AI art installation from scratch github.com · “This guide goes through all the steps to build your own AI art installation, using a button to change the AI artwork displayed on a screen.”
Aug 18
Finally, a Shot to Prevent Lyme Disease Could Be on Its Way outsideonline.com · “Lyme is treatable, and most people who are infected recover after a month of antibiotics if the disease is caught early.”
Aug 17
Asking nicely for root command execution (and getting it) rachelbythebay.com · “This was a pretty scary hole: you could ask it to run anything, and those commands would be run as root.”
Aug 17
Stop using Zoom, Hamburg's DPA warns state government techcrunch.com · “Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns.”
Aug 17
Mastodon now a non-profit organisation blog.joinmastodon.org · “Since I am the sole founder and shareholder, the 25,000 EUR are owed by me (with 12,500 EUR having had to be paid in at day of founding, and the remaining to be paid in the future).”
Aug 17
Psst: Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI github.com · “A fast Spotify client with a native GUI written in Rust, without Electron.”
Aug 16
Secret terrorist watchlist with 2 million records exposed online bleepingcomputer.com · “The list was left accessible on an Elasticsearch cluster that had no password on it.”
Aug 16
T-Mobile Confirms It Was Hacked vice.com · “In the forum post, they were offering data on 30 million people for 6 bitcoin, or around $270,000.”
Aug 16
Many Americans aren't aware they're being tracked with facial recognition while shopping techradar.com · “While San Francisco banned the police from using facial recognition back in 2019 and the EU called for a five year ban on the technology last year, several major retailers in the US including Lowe’s, Albertsons and Macy’s have been using it for both fraud and theft detection.”
Aug 16
Introducing the PineNote pine64.org · “This month brings news that many of you have been waiting years for - we’re introducing the PineNote, a high-end e-ink device based on the powerful Quartz64 single board computer.”
Aug 15
I figured out how DMARC works, and it almost broke me simonandrews.ca · “Then, I encountered a second problem: I had no idea what those were, and seemingly nobody has written about SPF, DKIM, or DMARC in a way that a human can understand, not to mention implement.”
Aug 15
MeiliSearch: A Minimalist Full-Text Search Engine tech.marksblogg.com · “Its built on top of the LMDB key-value store and lives as a 35 MB binary when installed on Ubuntu or MacOS.”
Aug 15
SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec ai.googleblog.com · “SoundStream at 3 kbps outperforms Opus at 12 kbps and approaches the quality of EVS at 9.6 kbps, while using 3.2x–4x fewer bits.”
Aug 15
Progress Report: August 2021 asahilinux.org · “The M1 represents a massive reverse engineering challenge, with lots of bespoke, completely undocumented hardware.”
Aug 14
Nail Your Startup Pitch: Use Pixar's Story Formula to Win Over Investors startuppitch.substack.com · “Pixar has been one of the most successful studios in the film industry, making movies grossing over $14 billion at the box office, and winning 23 Academy Awards.”
Aug 14
10×10% lars.ingebrigtsen.no · “Instead we’re down about 45%, from about 4400 bugs to 2690 bugs.”
Aug 14
Costa Rica signs law to attract digital nomads ticotimes.net · “Remote workers can obtain a permit to stay for one year in Costa Rica, extendable for one additional year.”
Aug 14
Remove all direct links to languagetransfer.org github.com · “Our app isn’t allowed to link to the homepage of the project’s own website unless we completely remove our users’ ability to discover a way to give us money.”
Aug 13
Apple regrets confusion over 'iPhone scanning' bbc.com · “He said that - in hindsight - introducing two features at the same time was "a recipe for this kind of confusion".”
Aug 13
It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record noaa.gov · “July 2021 has earned the unenviable distinction as the world’s hottest month ever recorded, according to new global data released today by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.”
Aug 13
Second IC :) sam.zeloof.xyz · “Now we know that it’s possible to make really good transistors with impure chemicals, no cleanroom, and homemade equipment.”
Aug 13
A future for SQL on the web jlongster.com · “Simple operations against the database take ~10ms (and I’m being charitable!), while it’s common for me to be profiling SQLite at ~.01ms.”
Aug 12
The Deceptive PR Behind Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children” piotr.is · “In contrast to how easy it is to explain to “an average Joe” why Google’s or Facebook’s business models pose a threat to people’s privacy, it’s very hard to explain why Apple’s new mechanism is even worse.”
Aug 12
Internet of Snitches puri.sm · “Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime.”
Aug 12
ZeroVer: 0-based Versioning 0ver.org · “Unlike other versioning schemes like Semantic Versioning and Calendar Versioning, ZeroVer (AKA 0ver) is simple: Your software’s major version should never exceed the first and most important number in computing: zero.”
Aug 12
GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces github.blog · “Mysterious breakage was so common and catastrophic that we’d codified an option for our bootstrap script: –nuke-from-orbit.”
Aug 11
An Old Hacker's Tips On Staying Employed madned.substack.com · “The best tip I have here is to make sure your boss is afraid.”
Aug 11
Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome zapier.com · “Then Brazil emptied the organization’s entire bank account into his own before skipping town.”
Aug 11
Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance engineering.fb.com · “The new service, built in-house and later open-sourced, was more scalable and improved the accuracy of timekeeping in the Facebook infrastructure from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds.”
Aug 11
TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app asia.nikkei.com · “A global survey of downloads in 2020 shows TikTok, a video-sharing app developed in China, on top of the list of social media providers for the first time since the study was first conducted in 2018.”
Aug 10
Firefox 91 Introduces Enhanced Cookie Clearing blog.mozilla.org · “When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s “cookie jar”.”
Aug 10
elementary OS 6 Odin Available Now blog.elementary.io · “We don’t make advertising deals or collect sensitive personal data.”
Aug 10
End of the line for Uber pluralistic.net · “Uber was never going to be profitable.”
Aug 10
Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity' bbc.com · “The landmark study warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade.”
Aug 9
Apple’s Mistake stratechery.com · “In this case, though, Apple is building the capability, and the only thing holding the company back is policy.”
Aug 9
This Sweet White Flower Is Actually A Sneaky Carnivore, Scientists Discover npr.org · “A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer.”
Aug 9
Why Thousands Of American Parents Are Sending Their Kids To 'Russian Math' wbur.org · “With 22,000 students at latest count, the school is the giant among Russian math programs, boasting 15 branches in Massachusetts, where it began, and 40 in total across the country.”
Aug 9
One Bad Apple hackerfactor.com · “In the six years that I’ve been using these hashes at FotoForensics, I’ve only matched 5 of these 3 million MD5 hashes.”
Aug 8
Apps Getting Worse tbray.org · “No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.””
Aug 8
Why I Wrote PGP philzimmermann.com · “Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.”
Aug 8
Space Station Incident Demands Independent Investigation spectrum.ieee.org · “How close the ISS had come to disaster is still an open question.”
Aug 8
A tweet cost him his doctorate: The extent of China’s influence on Swiss universities nzz.ch · “He had been tweeting for just 10 days, and had fewer than 10 followers.”
Aug 7
In internal memo, Apple addresses concerns around new Photo scanning features, doubles down on the need to protect children 9to5mac.com · “We know that the days to come will be filled with the screeching voices of the minority.”
Aug 7
After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him morningbrew.com · “At least two incidents reportedly led to confidential settlements in excess of $150,000 each.”
Aug 7
Bug in Lynx' SSL certificate validation leaks password in clear text via SNI openwall.com · “This is more severe than it initially looked like: Due to TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) the hostname as parsed by Lynx (i.e with “user:pass@” included) is sent in _clear_ text over the wire even _before_ I can even said “n” for “no, don’t continue to talk with this server” in Lynx’s prompt as shown above.”
Aug 7
CalyxOS calyxos.org · “CalyxOS is an Android mobile operating system that puts privacy and security into the hands of everyday users.”
Aug 6
The Problem with Perceptual Hashes rentafounder.com · “When such algorithms are used to detect criminal activities, especially at Apple scale, many innocent people can potentially face serious problems.”
Aug 6
Vehicles Are Still Firmly in Control of City Streets governing.com · “Often, fixing a road is a Trojan horse for widening the road.”
Aug 6
Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming matt-rickard.com · “Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on StackOverflow.”
Aug 6
Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life eff.org · “That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.”
Aug 5
Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech foundation.mozilla.org · “For example, neither Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, nor Google Home support a single native African language.”
Aug 5
HTTP/2: The Sequel is Always Worse portswigger.net · “HTTP/2 downgrading is when a front-end server speaks HTTP/2 with clients, but rewrites requests into HTTP/1.1 before forwarding them on to the back-end server.”
Aug 5
Why Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong blog.mozilla.org · “In our view, those claims simply do not hold water.”
Aug 5
The surreal experience of my first developer job bennuttall.com · “We had to make 10 apps per group every week.”
Aug 4
Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate leidenmedievalistsblog.nl · “However logical such an organic growth of a settlement might seem, it is not historically accurate.”
Aug 4
Simple Systems Have Less Downtime gkogan.co · “Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime.”
Aug 4
SAML is insecure by design joonas.fi · “SAML uses signatures based on computed values.”
Aug 4
JFrog Detects Malicious PyPI Packages Stealing Credit Cards and Injecting Code jfrog.com · “Based on data from pepy.tech, we estimate the malicious packages were downloaded about 30,000 times.”
Aug 3
Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? constructionphysics.substack.com · “At its best it seems to lay brick around 5 times faster than a human can, but it requires masons to follow behind it to clean the joints and occasionally level the bricks, and an on-site technician to handle technical issues.”
Aug 3
The Cryptocurrency Surveillance Provision Buried in the Infrastructure Bill is a Disaster for Digital Privacy eff.org · “The mandate to collect names, addresses, and transactions of customers means almost every company even tangentially related to cryptocurrency may suddenly be forced to surveil their users.”
Aug 3
The 5-hour CDN fly.io · “But CDNs are just web applications.”
Aug 3
The rise of never-ending job interviews bbc.com · “Then, he made it through three rounds of interviews for a director-level position at a company he really liked, only to receive an email to co-ordinate six more rounds.”
Aug 2
The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones mattruby.substack.com · “I was not archived, nor was I searchable; things I said just disappeared forever.”
Aug 2
WireGuardNT, a high-performance WireGuard implementation for the Windows kernel lists.zx2c4.com · “This has been a monumental undertaking, and if you’ve noticed that I haven’t read emails in about two months, now you know why.”
Aug 2
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription calpaterson.com · “The secret of printers is that you aren’t buying the printer but instead entering into a subscription for printer cartridges, which are often ruinous.”
Aug 2
New in Git: switch and restore banterly.net · “git checkout is one of the many reasons why newcomers find git confusing.”
Aug 1
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry mike.zwobble.org · “By comparison, having worked as a software developer for over a decade, the impact of the stuff I actually got paid to do seems underwhelming.”
Aug 1
Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era latimes.com · “Last month, employers posted more than 365,000 job openings for IT workers, the highest monthly total since September 2019, according to IT trade group CompTIA.”
Aug 1
Why printers add secret tracking dots bbc.com · “There is a long-running debate over whether it is ethical for printers to be attaching this information to documents without users knowing.”
Aug 1

July 2021 124 posts

CRDTs go brrr josephg.com · “Which algorithm was that? Well, this is awkward but .. it was mine.”
Jul 31
Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster) phiresky.netlify.app · “But if you want to use a database, you either need to write a backend (which you then need to host and maintain forever) or download the whole dataset into the browser (which is not so great when the dataset is more than 10MB).”
Jul 31
Cory Doctorow: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results locusmag.com · “Let’s talk about what machine learning is: it’s a statistical inference tool.”
Jul 31
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed raptitude.com · “Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money.”
Jul 31
Who Owns My Name? amandamarieknox.medium.com · “Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in?”
Jul 30
Cloudflare's inaccessible browser contradicts the company's mission mwcampbell.github.io · “Cloudflare’s neglect of accessibility in this product raises a new barrier to employment for blind people as companies adopt this product to improve the security of their networks.”
Jul 30
1 Out of 153 American Workers Is Now an Amazon Employee businessinsider.com · “That means one out of every 350 Americans works for Amazon, or one out of every 153 employed workers in the US.”
Jul 30
New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN phys.org · “It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks.”
Jul 30
700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built stackoverflow.blog · “That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.”
Jul 29
Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, founder of electric carmaker Nikola, on three counts of fraud cnbc.com · “A federal grand jury charged Nikola founder Trevor Milton with three counts of criminal fraud for lying about “nearly all aspects of the business” to bolster stock sales of the electric vehicle start-up, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.”
Jul 29
6 Command Line Tools for Productive Programmers earthly.dev · “I’m not a hard-core terminal guy – I use VSCode more than Vim – but I’m always surprised at the number of complex tasks that can be done using just the POSIX standard command-line tools like grep, cat and sort.”
Jul 29
Amazon's older Kindles will start to lose their internet access in December theverge.com · “For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all.”
Jul 29
IPv4 pricing docs.hetzner.com · “Supply and demand determine the price at IPv4 brokers, so the prices have skyrocketed.”
Jul 28
Evil tip: avoid "easy" things yosefk.com · “An easy thing is a heads they win, tails you lose situation.”
Jul 28
Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code techdirt.com · “Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising.”
Jul 28
Orbiter is now open source orbiter-forum.com · “I am still hoping to work on future enhancements of Orbiter, but I can’t make any promises or commitments.”
Jul 28
Element raises $30M to boost Matrix matrix.org · “However, there are no plans to use cryptocurrency incentives in Matrix or Element any time soon.”
Jul 27
Naval Architecture ciechanow.ski · “When I first heard the term naval architecture, I thought it was the artistic practice of designing beautiful boats.”
Jul 27
Postgres Full-Text Search: A Search Engine in a Database blog.crunchydata.com · “With Postgres, you don’t need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution.”
Jul 27
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF blog.kowalczyk.info · “Almost all of it was written by 2 people, with occasional contributions from others.”
Jul 27
We Need To Talk About The Insecurity Industry edwardsnowden.substack.com · “The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart.”
Jul 26
Eyes wide shut: How newborn mammals dream the world they're entering news.yale.edu · “A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born.”
Jul 26
Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI vice.com · “The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework.”
Jul 26
What's bad about Julia? viralinstruction.com · “As far as first impressions go, that isn’t exactly great, especially for a language touted for its speed.”
Jul 26
Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion cyclingnews.com · “She came into Tokyo without a pro team and left as Olympic Champion.”
Jul 25
Images from another user displayed in message github.com · “Best case the images are from another contact of B and messages got crossed, worst case they are from an unknown party, who’s data has now been leaked.”
Jul 25
Please, enough with the dead butterflies! emilydamstra.com · “In the photo of a dead, pinned butterfly below, note that the trailing edge of the forewings (blue line) is perpendicular to the body’s axis (red line).”
Jul 25
16 of 30 Google PHP results contain SQL injection vulnerabilities waritschlager.de · “Several of these results were, simply put, SEO-optimized baloney.”
Jul 25
Why self hosting is important dataswamp.org · “Self hosting is about freedom, you can choose what server you want to run, which version, which features and which configuration you want.”
Jul 24
Python behind the scenes #11: how the Python import system works tenthousandmeters.com · “The Python import system doesn’t just seem complicated – it is complicated.”
Jul 24
Electromagnetism is a property of spacetime itself, study finds sciencex.com · “So what is the mutual relationship of electromagnetism and gravitation?”
Jul 24
K-9 Mail is back k9mail.app · “Some of you will love it, some will hate it.”
Jul 24
The Framework Laptop is now shipping, and press reviews frame.work · “With the FTC unanimously voting to enforce the Right to Repair just yesterday, our timing couldn’t be better for delivering a great, high performance, easy to repair product.”
Jul 23
AWS's Egregious Egress blog.cloudflare.com · “AWS was a huge step forward in terms of flexibility and scalability, but a massive step backward in terms of pricing.”
Jul 23
Syncing all the things lwn.net · “The proliferation of computers leads directly to a familiar problem, though: the files we want are always on the wrong machine.”
Jul 23
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs mcmillen.dev · “We employ an empirical approach, using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which finds that merely 93% of paint splatters parse as valid Perl.”
Jul 23
Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0 engineering.fb.com · “Our last major version upgrade, to MySQL 5.6, took more than a year to roll out.”
Jul 22
SpaceX's Starlink Review - Four months in jeffgeerling.com · “Here’s the bottom line: Most of the time, I couldn’t tell I was using Starlink.”
Jul 22
Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech wired.com · “Radić saw a message stating that the video, which included nothing more scandalous than a discussion of the King’s Indian Defense, had violated YouTube’s community guidelines.”
Jul 22
Suit Claims Sexual Harassment, Discrimination At Game Studio Activision Blizzard npr.org · “A lawsuit filed by the state of California on Wednesday alleges sexual harassment, gender discrimination and violations of the state’s equal pay law at the video game giant Activision Blizzard.”
Jul 22
The FTC Votes Unanimously to Enforce Right to Repair wired.com · “During an open commission meeting Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously to enforce laws around the Right to Repair, thereby ensuring that US consumers will be able to repair their own electronic and automotive devices.”
Jul 21
Summer Blog Backlog: Distributed Systems oilshell.org · “Let’s start this post off with a bold claim: Kubernetes is Multics!”
Jul 21
A grandfather died of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle techspot.com · “He suffered a heart attack when police surrounded his home and died shortly after.”
Jul 21
Germany's national healthcare system adopts Matrix! matrix.org · “All servers in the Matrix-based private federation will be hosted within Germany.”
Jul 21
Our lawsuit against ChessBase stockfishchess.org · “ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights.”
Jul 20
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read (At Least Twice) michaelfeathers.silvrback.com · “We have to dig for it because of a peculiar fact about our industry: we reinvent our languages and notations every ten years.”
Jul 20
When Buddhism Goes Bad danlawton.substack.com · “And that’s when I split apart.”
Jul 20
Low Pay Is The Main Reason So Many Workers Are Quitting Restaurant Jobs npr.org · “They are leaving at the highest rate in decades.”
Jul 20
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? blogs.bmj.com · “But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong.”
Jul 19
Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech theregister.com · “Apple and SIS have a qualified law enforcement privilege that allows them to err in store security-related accusations and not be sued for it.”
Jul 19
Don't Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups. krebsonsecurity.com · “Experts say the biggest reason ransomware targets and/or their insurance providers still pay when they already have reliable backups is that nobody at the victim organization bothered to test in advance how long this data restoration process might take.”
Jul 19
Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure vice.com · “Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group, Amazon said in a statement.”
Jul 19
Right or Left, You Should Be Worried About Big Tech Censorship eff.org · “But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants.”
Jul 18
Revealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon theguardian.com · “The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.”
Jul 18
Towards Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute avi.im · “I don’t need the durability guarantee.”
Jul 18
Last Week on My Mac: The perils of M1 Ownership eclecticlight.co · “Last week, when trying to perform a macOS update on a second operating system on my M1 Mac mini, I only succeeded at the third attempt, after a total of five hours.”
Jul 18
Cryptographers unearth vulnerabilities in Telegram's encryption protocol cyberscoop.com · “An international team of computer scientists reported on Friday that they found four cryptographic vulnerabilities in the popular encrypted message app Telegram.”
Jul 17
GM Will Suck Lithium from the Salton Sea to Make Batteries autoweek.com · “So GM has just signed an innovative agreement with a company called Controlled Thermal Resources to extract Lithium from superheated waters beneath the Salton Sea in the desert of Southern California.”
Jul 17
I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week vice.com · “I haven’t gotten a raise in a decade.”
Jul 17
Master's degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education. slate.com · “For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred.”
Jul 17
The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano? alexanderpiano.nz · “After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.”
Jul 16
Focusing on Blue calebkruse.com · “One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye.”
Jul 16
The case for banning non-competes slowboring.com · “The question here is roughly something like “is innovation difficult, or is innovation expensive?””
Jul 16
Illinois Is The 1st State To Tell Police They Can't Lie To Minors In Interrogations npr.org · “They’ve also played a role in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA.”
Jul 16
How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. quantamagazine.org · “For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable.”
Jul 15
Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equipment by contractors mattstoller.substack.com · “Now, most new equipment is under contract, and instead of being able to repair, we are required to contact a civilian technician and they have to come onboard to fix problems.”
Jul 15
CVE-2021-22555: Turning \x00\x00 into 10000$ google.github.io · “CVE-2021-22555 is a 15 years old heap out-of-bounds write vulnerability in Linux Netfilter that is powerful enough to bypass all modern security mitigations and achieve kernel code execution.”
Jul 15
London Mainnet Announcement blog.ethereum.org · “It will go live on block 12 965 000, which is expected between August 3-5, 2021.”
Jul 15
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday typesense.org · “Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.”
Jul 14
Sega sued for 'rigged' Key Master arcade machine polygon.com · “A new lawsuit alleges that Key Master is intentionally rigged against players.”
Jul 14
Assertiveness is a virtue that anyone can develop with practice psyche.co · “Surely I should be capable of politely excusing myself from that sort of situation?”
Jul 14
Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021 tonsky.me · “This is a team coding challenge that lasts for 72 hours and in which you have to solve a series of very hard tasks by writing (functional) code.”
Jul 14
MacOS Nix Setup (an alternative to Homebrew) wickedchicken.github.io · “I never know if running brew install or brew upgrade is going to take 5 seconds or 20 minutes.”
Jul 13
Building a Vision of Life Without Work livingafi.com · “Love it or hate it, work fills most of the space in your life.”
Jul 13
83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds usehaystack.io · “A new study¹ has found that 83% of software developers suffer from workplace burnout.”
Jul 13
If You Want To Transform IT, Start With Finance zwischenzugs.com · “If you want to change an organisation, you need to look at how money works within it.”
Jul 13
Tesla's $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters thedrive.com · “After taking his vehicle to a Tesla service center, he was handed an estimate for more than $16,000 to replace said pack.”
Jul 12
Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies montanafreepress.org · “And though conventional farming continues to account for the overwhelming majority of Montana’s $4.6 billion ag sector, things are shifting.”
Jul 12
The art of asking nicely ai-weirdness.ghost.io · “And how good a picture you get depends on exactly how you ask for it.”
Jul 12
Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers blog.mozilla.org · “The fundamental security problem underlying cross-site attacks is that the web in its open nature does not allow web application servers to easily distinguish between requests originating from its own application or originating from a malicious (cross-site) application, potentially opened in a different browser tab.”
Jul 12
EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales engadget.com · “In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU.”
Jul 11
People Staring at Computers kylemcdonald.net · “In 2011 I was still under the false belief that all varieties of law enforcement are designed to protect the public from harm.”
Jul 11
Automated Hydroponic System Build kylegabriel.com · “And to make matters worse, if you have a prolonged power outage, you may need to manually water or have a generator to keep the water pump going, else you may injure your crops.”
Jul 11
Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues dsogaming.com · “And, we can now confirm that the pirated version does not suffer from any stuttering issues.”
Jul 11
Against SQL scattered-thoughts.net · “But SQL is a particularly inexpressive language.”
Jul 10
25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build (2021) michael.stapelberg.ch · “The PC consumes about 48W of power when idle (only management network connected) by default without further tuning.”
Jul 10
Behind the Scenes Lambda bschaatsbergen.com · “Workers have a lease lifetime of 14 hours, when a worker approaches this maximum, no further invocations are forwarded to the worker and the worker is terminated.”
Jul 10
CASP14: what Google DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 really achieved, and what it means for protein folding, biology and bioinformatics blopig.com · “Their results are so incredibly accurate that many have hailed this code as the solution to the long-standing protein structure prediction problem.”
Jul 10
NDA Expired - let's spill the beans on a weird startup shkspr.mobi · “We’re only going to get you interviews in companies which don’t already use our clients’ products.”
Jul 9
Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement bbc.com · “It allows repairs by its own authorised technicians only and does not generally provide spare parts or repair information.”
Jul 9
Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office is asking eenewseurope.com · “The study particularly wants to find examples of where a patent has been denied in the US but accepted in other jurisdictions, which will be a key area for European electronics companies.”
Jul 9
Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on a performance management plan seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees in Focus to fail the program and leave Amazon.”
Jul 9
We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200+ vacant apartments caretaker.com · “As one might expect, a big concern was the potential for abuse.”
Jul 8
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story erikbern.com · “Our data scientist ran the numbers, and our online ad cost per click keeps going down.”
Jul 8
Compiling Rust is NP-hard niedzejkob.p4.team · “What I noticed, and would like to share with you today, is that the exhaustiveness checking performed by the Rust compiler on match patterns is a superset of the SAT problem.”
Jul 8
The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes propublica.org · “Records reviewed by ProPublica show his federal income tax rate was just 12%.”
Jul 8
npm audit: Broken by Design overreacted.io · “As of today, npm audit is a stain on the entire npm ecosystem.”
Jul 7
Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising vivaldi.com · “These practices seriously undermine competition and take revenue away from content creators.”
Jul 7
Psilocybin repairs 'brains cells damaged by depression' leafie.co.uk · “They found increases in the number of dendritic spines and in their size within 24 hours of administration of psilocybin.”
Jul 7
A New Kind of Information-Coding Seen in the Human Brain quantamagazine.org · “For the first time, Jacobs and two coauthors spied neurons in the human brain encoding spatial information through the timing, rather than rate, of their firing.”
Jul 7
Chatcontrol: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communications patrick-breyer.de · “In today’s vote, 537 Members of the European Parliament approved Chatcontrol, with 133 voting against and 24 abstentions.”
Jul 6
Poisson's Equation mattferraro.dev · “We use Laplace’s equation to model any physical phenomenon where a scalar field is allowed to relax over time and we’re only interested in the final state.”
Jul 6
Leaving Google neugierig.org · “At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.”
Jul 6
Tencent Deploys Facial Recognition to Detect Minors Gaming at Night sixthtone.com · “Tencent began testing the use of facial recognition to check users’ age in Beijing and Shenzhen as of late 2018.”
Jul 6
How To Get Better at Painting, Without Painting Anything learning-to-see.co.uk · “You get better at doing something badly.”
Jul 5
XiangShan open-source 64-bit RISC-V processor to rival Arm Cortex-A76 cnx-software.com · “Since it’s a university project, it’s unclear whether it will ever be used commercially, but considering the Chinese government is looking for alternatives to x86 and Arm, I would not be surprised if XiangShan ends up in a processor for the Chinese market.”
Jul 5
GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright juliareda.eu · “What is astonishing about the current debate is that the calls for the broadest possible interpretation of copyright are now coming from within the Free Software community.”
Jul 5
Realtek WiFi Firmware and a Fully 8051-based Keylogger Using RealWOW Technology 8051enthusiast.github.io · “The funny thing is that this is effectively a keylogger that does not run any code on the CPU while it is running.”
Jul 5
GPT-J-6B: A 6 billion parameter, autoregressive text generation model github.com · “A 6 billion parameter, autoregressive text generation model trained on The Pile.”
Jul 4
Stockfish 14 stockfishchess.org · “Stockfish 14 is now at least 400 Elo ahead of Stockfish 7, a top engine in 2016.”
Jul 4
Soviet Venus Images mentallandscape.com · “The only existing images from the surface were returned from four of their landing craft.”
Jul 4
America's Growth Ponzi Scheme strongtowns.org · “Cities also assume the long-term liability for servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure, a promise that won’t come fully due for decades.”
Jul 4
Abandoning GitHub thelig.ht · “I consider this a severe attack on the rights of copyright holders so therefore I cannot continue to rely on GitHub’s services.”
Jul 3
US companies hit by 'colossal' cyber-attack bbc.com · “Kaseya said in its statement that a “small number” of companies had been affected, though Huntress Labs said the number was greater than 200.”
Jul 3
The Untold Story of SQLite corecursive.com · “We’ve sold exactly zero copies of that so that didn’t really work out.”
Jul 3
Things I wish Git had: Commit groups blog.danieljanus.pl · “In 13 years of using it, I’ve never found myself needing a feature it didn’t have.”
Jul 3
Simple, solar-powered water desalination news.mit.edu · “In this way, the team’s demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.”
Jul 2
Another 0-Day Looms for Many Western Digital Users krebsonsecurity.com · “The researchers said Western Digital never responded to their reports.”
Jul 2
Two Portland Delivery Companies Revolt Against Amazon, Shut Down vice.com · “Amazon refused, and the two companies in the Portland area terminated their contract with Amazon, their only client, effectively shutting down.”
Jul 2
Mise-en-place for knowledge workers fortelabs.co · “There is no class in college on how to triage your email inbox, manage your agenda, or organize your computer files.”
Jul 2
The most precious resource is agency simonsarris.substack.com · “Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence?”
Jul 1
Intuit to Share Payroll Data from 1.4M Small Businesses With Equifax krebsonsecurity.com · “At the time, all you needed to view someone’s entire work and salary history was their Social Security number and date of birth.”
Jul 1
British right to repair law comes into force today, but excludes smartphones and computers 9to5mac.com · “However, while you would expect “other electronic displays” to include iPhones, iPads, and most Macs, Which? states that these product categories are excluded.”
Jul 1
Exxon Lobbyists Reveal in Secret Recordings How They Manipulate Politicians and the Public gizmodo.com · “Two lobbyists for Exxon have been caught on tape admitting how the company manipulates politicians and the public.”
Jul 1

June 2021 121 posts

A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing kleinbottle.com · “They could do this because Amazon’s Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.”
Jun 30
SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll sparkfun.com · “Patent trolls are Americans that are destroying American manufacturing and small business.”
Jun 30
Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway. jacobian.org · “One study by HBR found that one in six IT projects had cost overruns of over 200% and were late by almost 70%.”
Jun 30
OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations theguardian.com · ““There is not one reason for moving, but a multitude of paper cuts, most of which have been triggered or amplified by Brexit,” Guillaume Rischard, the organisation’s treasurer, told members of the foundation in an email sent earlier this month.”
Jun 30
GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer copilot.github.com · “Trained on billions of lines of public code, GitHub Copilot puts the knowledge you need at your fingertips, saving you time and helping you stay focused.”
Jun 29
How to Work Hard paulgraham.com · “There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.”
Jun 29
How a Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur’s MongoDB database blog.newsblur.com · “When I containerized MongoDB, Docker helpfully inserted an allow rule into iptables, opening up MongoDB to the world.”
Jun 29
Bring Back Menus! slate.com · “Why should we be scared to go back to touching a communal piece of paper when we’re already breathing one another’s theoretically more dangerous air?”
Jun 29
I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC extremetech.com · “Specifically, Windows 11 Home will now require both internet access and a Microsoft account in order to set up the PC.”
Jun 28
Dear Google: Public Domain Compositions Exist blog.dbmiller.org · “Recently, I uploaded a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury to YouTube, and it instantly got hit by four copyright claims.”
Jun 28
SafeDollar ‘stablecoin’ drops to $0 following $248,000 DeFi exploit on Polygon cryptoslate.com · “SafeDollar (SDO) stablecoin proved to be anything but stable today as its price collapsed on the heels of an alleged cyberattack.”
Jun 28
Judge dismisses FTC and state antitrust complaints against Facebook cnbc.com · “In the filing, the court states that the FTC did not prove Facebook maintains a monopoly.”
Jun 28
Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · “It is currently estimated that 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient, a condition associated with disease states like hypertension, diabetes, and neurological disorders, to name a few.”
Jun 27
Windows 11, Amazon, and Uncomfortable Questions commonsware.com · “The problem is that Amazon modifies all those apps to be different than what the developers intended to ship.”
Jun 27
Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 1: Ethernet & ARP saminiir.com · “In this blog series, we will implement a minimal userspace TCP/IP stack for Linux.”
Jun 27
Cuba's vaccine rivals BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna dw.com · “Cuba’s health authorities said this week the domestically produced Abdala vaccine has proven to be 92% effective against the coronavirus in clinical trials.”
Jun 27
Reddit's disrespectful design ognjen.io · “But the logo has been made to link to the registration page.”
Jun 26
Winix: A UNIX-style Operating System for the Waikato RISC Architecture Microprocessor (WRAMP) github.com · “And, for a bit of fun, you can even play the classic game of snake by simply typing snake in the command line.”
Jun 26
He Inherited A Devastating Disease. A CRISPR Gene-Editing Breakthrough Stopped It npr.org · “On Saturday, researchers reported the first data indicating that the experimental treatment worked, causing levels of the destructive protein to plummet in Doherty’s body and the bodies of five other patients treated with the approach.”
Jun 26
So, You Want to Build a House More Efficiently austinvernon.eth.link · “Whether you are shipping 100 boxes of cellulose insulation or 100 boxes of computer chips, transportation from place A to place B costs about the same.”
Jun 26
Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out theguardian.com · “It correctly identified when cancer was present in 51.5% of cases, across all stages of the disease, and wrongly detected cancer in only 0.5% of cases.”
Jun 25
How I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern peachesnstink.com · “In other words, email addresses were being saved to the database when a user inputs an email and the input loses focus.”
Jun 25
Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches lkml.org · “You’re sending the patch representing your company, by doing this you’re really just damaging the already broken reputation.”
Jun 25
Why Do Recipe Writers Lie About How Long It Takes To Caramelize Onions? slate.com · “Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes.”
Jun 25
Google turned me into a serial killer hristo-georgiev.com · “It turns out that Google’s knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer.”
Jun 24
Microsoft announces Windows 11, with a new design, Start menu, and more theverge.com · “Much of the centered appearance is clearly influenced by macOS and Chrome OS, and Windows 11 also includes the rounded corners we’ve seen in both Android and iOS.”
Jun 24
Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do? news.ycombinator.com · “It was a critical function that locks us with them and goes against their selling message of “you own your data”.”
Jun 24
Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status quad9.net · “Quad9 has no relationship with any of the parties to the alleged infringement.”
Jun 24
John McAfee: Anti-virus creator found dead in prison cell bbc.com · “McAfee VirusScan helped to spark a multi-billion dollar industry in the computer world, and was eventually sold to technology giant Intel for more than $7.6bn (£4.7bn).”
Jun 23
Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps alexkrupp.typepad.com · “Most existing advice on software architecture is written for $10B+ companies, and as such tends to focus on maximizing things like performance, scalability, availability, reliability, etc.”
Jun 23
The Teamsters Announce Coordinated Nationwide Project to Unionize Amazon vice.com · “The Teamsters have 1.4 million members in the United States and Canada.”
Jun 23
I made 56874 calls to explore the telephone network. Here's what I found shufflingbytes.com · “Hackers of old used wardialing to explore the telephone network much like port-scanning is used today to explore the Internet.”
Jun 23
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python karpathy.github.io · “We are going to create, digitally sign, and broadcast a Bitcoin transaction in pure Python, from scratch, and with zero dependencies.”
Jun 22
Your CPU May Have Slowed Down on Wednesday travisdowns.github.io · “Only the date the benchmark was run varies.”
Jun 22
What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code? gir.st · “What is not included is the date during which she is considered immune.”
Jun 22
Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work news.ycombinator.com · “I think I’d be able to get my devopsy work done in ~3 hours/day if I manage my time well and schedule most meetings on Mondays.”
Jun 22
Ask HN: I was hit with a patent troll lawsuit, how do I deal with it? news.ycombinator.com · “The patent in question involves downloading a remote database to a mobile device used as a lookup table when scanning a QR code.”
Jun 21
git undo: We can do better blog.waleedkhan.name · “When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it.”
Jun 21
Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show.”
Jun 21
USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral news.usc.edu · “It’s a simple setup: a sheet of plexiglass surrounded by a wood frame and LED lighting.”
Jun 21
Nixos-unstable’s iso_minimal.x86_64-linux is 100% reproducible! discourse.nixos.org · “Next goal: 100% reproducible GNOME ISO”
Jun 20
2014 UN271: A possible dwarf planet from the Oort Cloud on a tour through the Solar System groups.io · “This new object, 2014 UN271, is not just unusual, but radically exceptional among all known bodies in the Solar System to date.”
Jun 20
What Every Programmer Should Know About SSDs databasearchitects.blogspot.com · “A random read from an SSD, in contrast, takes about 100us – 100 times faster.”
Jun 20
The Memo chrislaing.net · “This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success.”
Jun 20
Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 adamcadre.ac · “What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish.”
Jun 19
State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10? ntdotdev.wordpress.com · “We’ve all heard this riddle: if you dig down deep enough in Windows 10, you’ll find elements that date from Windows 3.x days.”
Jun 19
North Carolina Board Tells Retired Engineer He Can’t Talk About Engineering ij.org · “In North Carolina, practicing without a license can result in criminal misdemeanor charges.”
Jun 19
Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess morrick.me · “Nothing was designed specifically with the Mac in mind.”
Jun 19
Cybereason: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again venturebeat.com · “In fact, 80% of organizations that paid the ransom were hit by a second attack, and almost half were hit by the same threat group.”
Jun 18
Friday Facts #366 - The only way to go fast, is to go well! factorio.com · “The only way to go fast is to go well!”
Jun 18
Super Mario World (SNES) Widescreen Project github.com · “Since the original SNES does not have this resolution, the emulator focused into high definition mods bsnes-hd must be used.”
Jun 18
Oregon Has Legalized Human Composting vice.com · “Gov. Kate Brown signed House Bill 2574 into law on Tuesday, adding natural organic reduction to the range of approved after-life options in the west coast state.”
Jun 18
Start Your Own ISP startyourownisp.com · “This site is dedicated to helping you start your own Internet Service Provider.”
Jun 17
The Document Culture of Amazon justingarrison.com · “Most of the time, if there isn’t a doc there isn’t a meeting.”
Jun 17
The Meltdown of IRON irony-97882.medium.com · “Like many financial collapse stories, this is a story of folly.”
Jun 17
Rethinking Triplebyte triplebyte.com · “We no longer require a quiz or interview to join.”
Jun 17
Apple's iCloud+ “VPN” metzdowd.com · “In one move, Apple has taken onion routing from a specialized tool for hackers to something that will be in daily use on billions of devices.”
Jun 16
nushell: A new type of shell github.com · “Rather than thinking of files and data as raw streams of text, Nu looks at each input as something with structure.”
Jun 16
The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed! programming.guide · “Ironically it happens to be buggy.”
Jun 16
4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says npr.org · “And as its workers took five Fridays off in August, they printed nearly 60 percent fewer pages.”
Jun 16
Cryptanalysis of the GPRS Encryption Algorithms GEA-1 and GEA-2 eprint.iacr.org · “This unusual pattern indicates that the weakness is intentionally hidden to limit the security level to 40 bit by design.”
Jun 16
15 Universities Have Formed A Company That Looks A Lot Like A Patent Troll eff.org · “Patents in this context are legal tools that allow someone to monopolize publicly-funded research and capture its promise for a private end.”
Jun 15
The quiet rise of E Ink Tablets and Infinite Paper Note Takers - reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air hanselman.com · “This device is NOT an iPad and if your first thought is, “but I have an iPad” then this isn’t for you.”
Jun 15
Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC digiday.com · “But Amazon’s blocking appears scattered.”
Jun 15
Europe's Software Problem berthub.eu · “Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms.”
Jun 15
Stripe Identity: Verify identities with confidence stripe.com · “Poor image capture is the most common reason legitimate users are mistakenly rejected.”
Jun 14
“The great resignation”: Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs axios.com · “Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.”
Jun 14
Myths Debunked: Why Wide Tires Are NOT Slower renehersecycles.com · “There was no doubt that the narrowest tires were slower than slightly wider ones.”
Jun 14
Irish police to be given powers over passwords bbc.com · “Irish police will have the power to compel people to provide passwords for electronic devices when carrying out a search warrant under new legislation.”
Jun 14
Gooey: Turn (almost) any Python command line program into a full GUI application with one line github.com · “Because as much as we love the command prompt, the rest of the world looks at it like an ugly relic from the early ’80s.”
Jun 13
Last Week on My Mac: The elephant at WWDC eclecticlight.co · “Yet both are unmistakable signs of the elephant at WWDC: documentation.”
Jun 13
How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line smallstep.com · “The command line really wasn’t designed for secrets.”
Jun 13
Goodbye Freenode nedbatchelder.com · “After the channel was closed, people asking staff about what happened were banned from asking.”
Jun 13
Do You Need Redis? PostgreSQL Does Queuing, Locking, & Pub/Sub spin.atomicobject.com · “In practice, most of the apps I’ve worked on have fewer than a dozen background workers, and the cost is not likely to be significant.”
Jun 12
How Fighter Jets Lock On (and How the Targets Know) gizmodo.com · “In track mode, the radar focuses its energy on a particular target.”
Jun 12
How To Win At Risk By Using Systems Thinking thesystemisdown.substack.com · “This exception is probably explained by the fact that you only get two bonus armies from keeping Australia.”
Jun 12
Taildrop was kind of easy, actually tailscale.com · “It never stores your files in the cloud or sends them to us.”
Jun 12
Don't Feed the Thought Leaders earthly.dev · “Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite.”
Jun 11
Victory! New York Senate Passes Landmark Right to Repair Bill ifixit.com · “At a virtual session, the Senate approved S4104 by a margin of 51 to 12.”
Jun 11
Apple admits why its own Files app was ranked first when users searched for competitor Dropbox theverge.com · ““Dropbox wasn’t even visible on the first page [of search results],” Sweeney wrote.”
Jun 11
'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown capecodtimes.com · “He estimated he was in the whale for 30 to 40 seconds before the whale finally surfaced.”
Jun 11
Stripe Tax: Automate tax collection on your Stripe transactions stripe.com · “SaaS sales are 100% taxable in New York, 80% in Texas, and non-taxable in California.”
Jun 10
Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines lore.kernel.org · “The half-life of mRNA is a few hours.”
Jun 10
Always be quitting jmmv.dev · “The key lies in NOT being indispensable.”
Jun 10
The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains ez.substack.com · “The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul.”
Jun 10
Tell HN: SMS-based two-factor authentication is not secure news.ycombinator.com · “It took less than 30 minutes for these events to transpire.”
Jun 9
Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees cnbc.com · “Additionally, Zuckerberg said Facebook will begin allowing employees to request remote work across international borders.”
Jun 9
2021.06.08 Certificate Lifetime Incident (valid for an extra one second) community.letsencrypt.org · “This inclusivity means that Let’s Encrypt’s certificates have all been actually valid for 90 days plus 1 second.”
Jun 9
One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown bbc.co.uk · “But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing “85% of our network to return errors”, it said.”
Jun 9
Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility dispatch.com · “The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages.”
Jun 8
A Project of One's Own paulgraham.com · “Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking.”
Jun 8
The Althttpd Webserver sqlite.org · “Althttpd has no configuration file.”
Jun 8
Australian Federal Police and FBI nab criminal underworld figures in worldwide sting using encrypted app abc.net.au · “Authorities say they were able to read up to 25 million messages in real time.”
Jun 8
How Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project intuitiveexplanations.com · “Luckily we’re bigger now, and crucially have a lot of money to pay for top lawyers now if we’re forced to go that route.”
Jun 7
How I uncovered a black-hat SEO scam casparwre.de · “Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings.”
Jun 7
FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows via the web theverge.com · “The video calling service was previously only available on iOS and Mac devices.”
Jun 7
Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors farms.com · “On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.”
Jun 7
Oceana Finds Hundreds of Vessels Vanishing Along Argentina’s Waters usa.oceana.org · “These vessels were invisible for more than 600,000 total hours, hiding fishing vessel locations and masking potentially illegal behavior, such as crossing into Argentina’s national waters to fish.”
Jun 6
A new future for icanhazip major.io · “The site went from 1B requests per day to 30-35B requests per day over a weekend.”
Jun 6
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding skamille.medium.com · “How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen”
Jun 6
Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater mining.com · “According to the researchers, the cell will probably need $5 of electricity to extract 1 kilogram of lithium from seawater.”
Jun 6
G7: Rich nations back deal to tax multinationals bbc.co.uk · “They also agreed in principle to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% to avoid countries undercutting each other.”
Jun 5
Password Managers lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “I often say that “use a password manager” is bad advice.”
Jun 5
Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins appleinsider.com · “Each browser vendor will continue to operate independently with their own policies.”
Jun 5
If Not Overturned, a Bad Copyright Decision Will Lead Many Americans to Lose Internet Access eff.org · “If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages.”
Jun 5
An Unbelievable Demo brendangregg.com · “A US developer got a world tour for software he didn’t write, which included giving a sales pitch and demo in Australia, unwittingly, to the author.”
Jun 4
Tank Man jeffwidener.com · “There was a long line of tanks approaching from the Square and I thought it might be a nice compression shot.”
Jun 4
Why We Should End the Data Economy thereboot.com · “The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you.”
Jun 4
Aaron Swartz, vindicated pluralistic.net · “This isn’t law as we know it, it’s Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn’t completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.”
Jun 4
United Airlines will buy 15 ultrafast airplanes from start-up Boom Supersonic cnbc.com · “Boom’s first commercial supersonic jet, the Overture, has not been built or certified yet.”
Jun 3
HTML and CSS techniques to reduce your JavaScript calendar.perfplanet.com · “When JavaScript runs, the browser delays user interaction events and interface updates.”
Jun 3
Developer relations marco.org · “The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy.”
Jun 3
Microsoft’s Irish subsidiary posted £220bn profit in single year theguardian.com · “The profit generated by Microsoft Round Island One is equal to nearly three-quarters of Ireland’s gross domestic product – even though the company has no employees.”
Jun 3
Apple asks staff to return to office three days a week starting in early September theverge.com · “Managers need to approve remote work requests.”
Jun 2
PayPal Shuts Down Long-Time Tor Supporter with No Recourse eff.org · “PayPal denied that the shutdown was related to the concerns about Tor, claiming only that “the situation has been determined appropriately” and refusing to offer a specific explanation.”
Jun 2
Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered actu.epfl.ch · “We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots.”
Jun 2
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months theguardian.com · “Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out.”
Jun 2
Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing theguardian.com · “Users can disable Sidewalk in the settings section of the Alexa or Ring apps, but have until 8 June to do so.”
Jun 1
Best Practices Around Production Ready Web Apps with Docker Compose nickjanetakis.com · “Here’s a few patterns I’ve picked up based on using Docker since 2014.”
Jun 1
AMD Demonstrates Stacked 3D V-Cache Technology: 192 MB at 2 TB/sec anandtech.com · “AMD claims that the total bandwidth of the L3 cache increases to beyond 2 TB/sec, which would technically be faster than the L1 cache on the die (but with higher latency).”
Jun 1
The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9 jeffgeerling.com · “This is a very real benchmark that impacts my ability to get work done.”
Jun 1

May 2021 124 posts

Wikipedia Endowment: The Site Is Rich. Why Is It Fundraising? dailydot.com · “But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year, according to a casual 2013 estimate by Erik Möller, its VP of engineering and product development at the time.”
May 31
The most expensive number in engineering surjan.substack.com · “By my estimation, a single number cost $1.5 billion on the Space Shuttle.”
May 31
We Only Ever Talk About the Third Attack on Pearl Harbor butwhatfor.com · “Eventually, Admiral Yarnell’s victory was declared void due to complaints that he had acted in an unfair manner – that if there had been a state of war, the element of surprise would not have been a factor.”
May 31
Space Debris Has Hit And Damaged The International Space Station sciencealert.com · “A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station - namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm.”
May 31
Drunk Post: Things I've learned as a Sr Engineer old.reddit.com · “The best way I’ve advanced my career is by changing companies.”
May 30
Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie mattstoller.substack.com · “Free shipping is the God of online retail, so powerful that France actually banned the practice to protect its retail outlets.”
May 30
Couple Buys $7,000 Camera from Amazon, Gets Empty Boxes Instead petapixel.com · “Chiles says that he and his wife have proof that the package was not correctly delivered, as the UPS tracking label lists the weight of the box as just two pounds.”
May 30
Overkill Objects for Everyday Life neil.computer · “Whenever I need to buy something, the first thing I do is try to think of the most overkill version of it.”
May 30
Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel dental.washington.edu · “Each lozenge deposits several micrometers of new enamel on the teeth via the peptide, which is engineered to bind to the damaged enamel to repair it while not affecting the mouth’s soft tissue.”
May 29
'Apple is eating our lunch': Google employees admit in lawsuit that the company made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private businessinsider.com · “Google continued collecting location data even when users turned off various location-sharing settings, made popular privacy settings harder to find, and even pressured LG and other phone makers into hiding settings precisely because users liked them, according to the documents.”
May 29
MOTOROiD global.yamaha-motor.com · “It was a showstopping sight at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2017.”
May 29
Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in B.C. aptnnews.ca · “She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.”
May 29
I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time awesomekling.github.io · “It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden.”
May 28
Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid nltimes.nl · “The company also let go of thousands of people during the coronavirus pandemic.”
May 28
Your iPhone (and iCloud backups) are full of gigabytes-worth of old iMessages that are virtually impossible to read keydiscussions.com · “We pay for the right to read our old messages in a few ways: precious space on our 64GB iPhones (the base level storage amount for iPhones), our Macs, and our iCloud storage, which Apple charges us for each month.”
May 28
QUIC is now RFC 9000 fastly.com · “Starting as an experiment at Google, QUIC was developed through a collaborative and iterative standardization process at the IETF after almost five years, 26 face-to-face meetings, 1,749 issues, and many thousands of emails.”
May 28
Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals? news.ycombinator.com · “What are your favorite blogs run by individual people?”
May 27
NocoDB: The Open Source Airtable alternative github.com · “Turns any MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB into a smart-spreadsheet.”
May 27
World now likely to hit watershed 1.5 °C rise in next five years, warns UN weather agency news.un.org · “The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said there was a 40% chance of the watershed global warming mark being met during the time frame, and these odds are increasing with time.”
May 27
Immediate skin-to-skin contact with unstable newborns improves chances of survival medlifestyle.news · “In newborns with a very low birth weight, continuous skin-to-skin contact immediately after delivery, even before the baby has been stabilized, can lower mortality by 25%.”
May 27
M1RACLES: M1ssing Register Access Controls Leak EL0 State m1racles.com · “Basically, Apple decided to break the ARM spec by removing a mandatory feature, because they figured they’d never need to use that feature for macOS.”
May 26
Neovim (0.5) Is Overpowering crispgm.com · “For an end-user without much deeper knowledge, the biggest differences might be XDG_PATH based directory and init.vim file name.”
May 26
Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Computer Science Research m-cacm.acm.org · “I want to alert the community to a growing problem that attacks the fundamental assumptions that the review process has depended upon.”
May 26
Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked gentoo.org · “As a part of an unannounced switch to a different IRC daemon, the Freenode staff has removed all channel and nickname registrations.”
May 26
Stripe Payment Links stripe.com · “The same payment link can be shared with many customers and used across multiple channels.”
May 25
Rare Vietnam War Images from the Winning Side, 1965-1975 rarehistoricalphotos.com · “The history of the war has been a partial one, underscored by the American dominance of the English-language historiography of the war and the focus on American policies and the American experience of the war, coupled with a mostly negative assessment of South Vietnam.”
May 25
It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code qntm.org · “That said, the major problem I have with Clean Code is that a lot of the example code in the book is just dreadful.”
May 25
EU agrees new Belarus sanctions after plane arrest bbc.com · “At a meeting in Brussels, the leaders of the 27 member states also told EU airlines not to fly over Belarus, and promised further economic sanctions.”
May 25
How a Japanese Company Cut 80% of the Time Needed to Manually Count Pearls countthings.com · “Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year.”
May 24
Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1 dolphin-emu.org · “Apple requires W^X (Write Xor Execute) conformance for native macOS M1 applications.”
May 24
Welcome to Inkscape 1.1! inkscape.org · “Among the highlights in Inkscape 1.1 are a Welcome dialog, a Command Palette, a revamped Dialog Docking System, and searchable preference options, along with new formats for exporting your work.”
May 24
In praise of --dry-run gresearch.co.uk · “But it’s sadly often the case that a tool’s –dry-run is an unloved second-class citizen, prone to drifting out of date or failing to provide all the information you need.”
May 24
One Man’s Fight for the Right to Repair Broken MacBooks columbianewsservice.com · “Apple contractually forces recycling partners to shred old devices, according to a 2017 Motherboard investigation, preventing the parts from being reused.”
May 23
Belarus 'diverts Ryanair flight to arrest journalist', opposition says bbc.co.uk · “Belarus media said a MiG-29 escorted the jet to Minsk because of a bomb scare but no explosives were found.”
May 23
Why I prefer making useless stuff web.eecs.utk.edu · “There is nothing I find more liberating than to spend a Saturday afternoon coding on some toy project.”
May 23
Monetizing Open-source is problematic marak.com · “No one pays for Faker development.”
May 23
A New Replication Crisis: Research that is Less Likely to be True is Cited More ucsdnews.ucsd.edu · “Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management.”
May 22
You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup every.to · “There is a romantic vision of startup employment that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny.”
May 22
A look at Postgres 14: Performance and Monitoring Improvements pganalyze.com · “The Postgres connection model relies on processes instead of threads.”
May 22
KolibriOS kolibrios.org · “It requires only a few megabytes of disk space, an i586 processor, and 12 MB of RAM to run.”
May 22
Sublime Text 4 sublimetext.com · “Sublime Text license keys are no longer tied to a single major version, instead they are now valid for all updates within 3 years of purchase.”
May 21
Learn CSS web.dev · “Everything displayed by CSS is a box.”
May 21
We just reached 500k sounds… and Freesound got faster! blog.freesound.org · “At some point during the past weekend, the number of sounds which are available for download in Freesound has surpassed half a million.”
May 21
voice2json: Command-line tools for speech and intent recognition on Linux voice2json.org · “voice2json is a collection of command-line tools for offline speech/intent recognition on Linux.”
May 21
Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance talawah.io · “This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON “API” requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.”
May 20
Introducing WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in your browser blog.stackblitz.com · “The advent of WebAssembly and new capabilities APIs made it seem possible to write a WebAssembly-based operating system powerful enough to run Node.js, entirely inside your browser.”
May 20
How the UK's Online Safety Bill threatens Matrix matrix.org · “The bill itself does not actually provide a definition of harmful, instead relying on service providers to assess and decide on this.”
May 20
“I could rewrite curl” daniel.haxx.se · “But there’s a huge difference between thinking and saying.”
May 20
A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work madned.substack.com · “It did not even come even close to occurring to me back then that the nerdy things I liked to do for fun would allow me to dodge any kind of manual labor job, basically forever.”
May 19
Welcome to Libera Chat libera.chat · “Most of our staff have joined us from freenode, and we intend to continue its legacy.”
May 19
The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge blogs.windows.com · “Today, we are at the next stage of that journey: we are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge.”
May 19
Poor in Tech megelison.com · “I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because they always ordered extra catered lunches, and at the end of the week someone would just throw them away if I didn’t take them home.”
May 19
Ethereum's energy usage will soon decrease by ~99.95% blog.ethereum.org · “Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years.”
May 18
Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together blog.google · “Project Starline is currently available in just a few of our offices and it relies on custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment.”
May 18
The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company blog.thea.codes · “Winterbloom is a boutique, open-source synthesizer company and it has exactly one engineer - me.”
May 18
Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search plausible.io · “Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.”
May 18
Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps? bbc.com · “In fact, much of both Israel and the Palestinian territories appear on Google Earth as low-resolution satellite imagery, even though higher-quality images are available from satellite companies.”
May 17
Apple Music announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio apple.com · “These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost.”
May 17
Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate krebsonsecurity.com · “Ensuring that no affiliates can produce victims in their own countries is the easiest way for these criminals to stay off the radar of domestic law enforcement agencies.”
May 17
Cosmopolitan Libc 1.0 github.com · “Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn’t need an interpreter or virtual machine.”
May 17
Observing my cellphone switch towers fabiensanglard.net · “eNBs have a much higher density than I thought.”
May 16
Building a Personal [Origami] Website in 2021 origami.kosmulski.org · “Longevity: this is a complete gamble. Social media platforms come and go.”
May 16
I Have a Lot to Say About Signal’s Cellebrite Hack cyberlaw.stanford.edu · “I think the impact on existing cases will be negligible, but that Signal has made an important point that may help push the mobile device forensics industry towards greater accountability for their often sloppy product security.”
May 16
systemd: The Good Parts christine.website · “One of the big differences between systemd and other things like OpenRC is that systemd is a very declarative environment.”
May 16
Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years turriate.com · “JavaScript has come a long way since I knew it as the “D” in DHTML.”
May 15
China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars bbc.com · “Only the Americans have really mastered landing on Mars until now.”
May 15
The return of fancy tools macwright.com · “Frictionless note-taking produces notes, but it doesn’t - for me - produce memory.”
May 15
Things you can’t do in Rust (and what to do instead) blog.logrocket.com · “Arguably the most-asked-about missing feature coming from object-oriented languages is inheritance.”
May 15
DarkSide Ransomware Gang Quits After Servers, Bitcoin Stash Seized krebsonsecurity.com · “The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
May 14
Zulip 4.0: Threaded open-source team chat blog.zulip.com · “With 68 people who’ve contributed 100+ commits, Zulip has by far the most active open-source development community of any team chat software, and is translated into 17 languages.”
May 14
I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff p.haavard.me · “I cannot stand by such a (hostile?) corporate takeover of the freenode network, and I am resigning along with most other freenode staff.”
May 14
Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban themarkup.org · “Reed had inadvertently stumbled into a cottage industry of sites that charge high premiums for what are otherwise free or inexpensive government services.”
May 14
Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals vice.com · “The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.”
May 13
What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months blog.roastmylandingpage.com · “It ended up generating me over £70,000 of work, over 2,000 email subscribers, and an ever-growing list of insights into the pains and challenges of early stage businesses and the amazing people that run them.”
May 13
Cross-Browser Tracking Vulnerability in Tor, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox fingerprintjs.com · “The vulnerability uses information about installed apps on your computer to assign you a permanent unique identifier even if you switch browsers, use incognito mode, or use a VPN.”
May 13
As much as $365 billion wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops car purchases with bitcoin cnbc.com · “Musk said Tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and intends to use it for transactions “as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.””
May 13
Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions workspaceupdates.googleblog.com · “Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.”
May 12
'Champions League of tax avoidance:' Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on nearly $6 billion in revenue, report says businessinsider.com.au · “Despite earning $5.8 billion in global revenues in 2019, Uber claimed a $4.5 billion loss for tax purposes.”
May 12
Send My: Arbitrary data transmission via Apple's Find My network positive.security · “Being inherent to the privacy and security-focused design of the Find My Offline Finding system, it seems unlikely that this misuse can be prevented completely”
May 12
Erlang/OTP 24 Highlights blog.erlang.org · “Finally Erlang/OTP 24 is here! A release that for me has been about 10 years in the making.”
May 12
Germany bans Facebook from handling WhatsApp data euronews.com · “The regulator suggested that the decision wasn’t just about protecting users’ privacy but also to avoid the use of data “to influence voters’ decisions to manipulate democratic choices,” citing the upcoming September 26 parliamentary elections in Germany.”
May 11
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? babeljs.io · “Since 2018, Babel has been doing a funding experiment: can full time work on Babel be sustained? We’ve learned the answer might be no.”
May 11
FragAttacks: Security flaws in all Wi-Fi devices fragattacks.com · “Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities.”
May 11
I Mailed an AirTag and Tracked Its Progress; Here’s What Happened intego.com · “Apple touts their network of nearly a billion devices capable of spotting AirTags, and if there are that many, it should be easy to track this envelope across the country.”
May 11
US fuel pipeline hackers 'didn't mean to create problems' bbc.com · “The pipeline carries 2.5 million barrels a day - 45% of the East Coast’s supply of diesel, petrol and jet fuel.”
May 10
Writing books isn't a good idea ellegriffin.substack.com · “The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.””
May 10
Using PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse narrator.ai · “Word of caution: do NOT use your production Postgres instance for data reporting / metrics.”
May 10
Dear EU: Please Don't Ruin the Root berthub.eu · “Surprisingly however, the European Commission version of the directive explicitly includes all the root servers, the infrastructure that keeps the internet alive.”
May 10
The Animal Is Tired robinhobb.com · “I reflect, sheepishly, that it is the only animal I have ever treated this way.”
May 9
The Ultimate Guide to Inflation lynalden.com · “This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind.”
May 9
The global chip shortage is starting to have major real-world consequences cnbc.com · “The severity of the global chip shortage has gone up a notch over the last few weeks and it’s now looking as though millions of people will be impacted.”
May 9
Why do we buy into the 'cult' of overwork? bbc.com · “New studies show that workers around the world are putting in an average of 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime per week – up from 7.3 hours just a year ago.”
May 9
Experience: I’ve had the same supper for 10 years theguardian.com · “I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end.”
May 8
How I Practice Piano frogurncitadel.wordpress.com · “If you keep making mistakes when practicing then you are just going to get good at making them, so it’s best to avoid them in the first place.”
May 8
Linux Foundation starts AgStack, world's first open-source agtech initiative investableuniverse.com · “Linux Foundation noted in its official AgStack announcement on Wednesday that 33 percent of all food produced is wasted, while nine percent of the people in the world are hungry or undernourished.”
May 8
The Byte Order Fiasco justine.lol · “Aside from being ugly, the code above is wrong.”
May 8
Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com · “Facebook is unhappy about this because it makes money by tracking you all over the web until the end of time.”
May 7
Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach safetydetectives.com · “In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities.”
May 7
Searching the web for < $1000 / month quickwit.io · “Storing the index on Amazon S3 costs $160 per month and deploying a small pool of two search instances costs $650 per month.”
May 7
WhatsApp will progressively kill features until users accept new privacy policy androidpolice.com · “However, after a few weeks of that, WhatsApp will then switch off all incoming notifications and calls for your account, effectively rendering it useless.”
May 7
LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online techstartups.com · “LiveLeak, a popular British video sharing website known for footage of war, politics, and many other world events usually censored on other video websites, like YouTube, abruptly shuts down today after 15 years online.”
May 6
Crazy New Ideas paulgraham.com · “Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to be interesting.”
May 6
Why I Work on Ads jefftk.com · “Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive: a newspaper at $220/y is effectively much more expensive for someone earning $10k than $100k.”
May 6
IBM Creates First 2nm Chip anandtech.com · “IBM’s press relations stated that a fingernail in this context is 150 square millimeters.”
May 6
ClearURLs: automatically remove tracking elements from URLs github.com · “Many websites use tracking elements in the URL (e.g. https://example.com?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sale) to mark your online activity.”
May 5
HTML Tips and Tricks: 20 You Won’t See in Most Tutorials markodenic.com · “Performance tip. You can use the loading=lazy attribute to defer the loading of the image until the user scrolls to them.”
May 5
Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send github.com · “Mozilla discontinued Send, this fork is a community effort to keep the project up-to-date and alive.”
May 5
Me2BA Product Testing Spotlight Report Published: Data Sharing in Primary & Secondary School Mobile Apps me2ba.org · “The Me2B Alliance Product Testing team audited a random sample of 73 apps from 38 schools in 14 states across the U.S., covering over half a million people (students, their families, educators, etc.).”
May 5
The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you signal.org · “Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.”
May 4
Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt cloudirregular.substack.com · “AWS is the only cloud provider that creates these problems.”
May 4
Cinder: Instagram's performance oriented fork of CPython github.com · “Cinder is not polished or documented for anyone else’s use.”
May 4
Efficiency is the Enemy fs.blog · “Gloria’s job is to ensure Tony is as busy as he needs to be.”
May 4
The Unix Magic poster jpmens.net · “The oregano is reputedly referring to an incident in which one of the original folks involved with BSD was hassled for coming across the Canadian/U.S. border with a bag of what was assumed to be an illegal substance, and turned out to be oregano.”
May 3
Rust's Most Unrecognized Contributor brson.github.io · “One of the people most responsible for Rust’s success though is almost completely unrecognized.”
May 3
Practical SQL for Data Analysis hakibenita.com · “Pandas alone consumes ~37M of memory: Just importing pandas, before even doing anything with it, consumes a significant amount of memory.”
May 3
Stop making your paying customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website. blog.stunning.co · “Why are we showing people a huge marquee and a red carpet before they are customers, and then leaving a side door open in the alley once they are paying us?”
May 3
How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents berthub.eu · “So the core of the company is no longer building something, the core of the company is buying something, and managing risk with contracts and procedures.”
May 2
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part IV rosenzweig.io · “We are passing about 75% of the OpenGL ES 2.0 tests in the drawElements Quality Program used to establish Khronos conformance.”
May 2
Tiny Wins joelcalifa.com · “This was a one-line code change that took a few minutes.”
May 2
What3Words – The Algorithm cybergibbons.com · “What3Words say the odds are “1 in 2.5 million” – but they seem to be under 1 in 100 in cities in the UK.”
May 2
Shared libraries are not a good thing in general lore.kernel.org · “And the memory savings are often actually negative (again, unless it’s some big library that is typically used by lots of different programs at the same time).”
May 1
SSD Makers start warning that Mining Products Like Chia Coin Will Void Warranty guru3d.com · “A new trend in cryptocurrency mining is using SSDs for Chia Coins mining.”
May 1
Muse Group formed to support MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar; acquires Audacity scoringnotes.com · “The company that already owns the music notation software and online catalog MuseScore and the Ultimate Guitar community and guitar tab catalog has announced its acquisition of Audacity, the popular free audio editing software.”
May 1
Will Linux phones stay around this time? linmob.net · “Openmoko supposedly had 10,000 phones shipped in 2009, PINE64 have already shipped more than 3 times that amount.”
May 1

April 2021 125 posts

Internal Combustion Engine ciechanow.ski · “The invention of the internal combustion engine in the 19th century has revolutionized transportation over land, water, and air.”
Apr 30
'It's your device, you should be able to repair it' bbc.com · “A record 53.6 million tonnes of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2019, with less than a fifth of it being recycled, according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2020.”
Apr 30
EU says Apple’s App Store breaks competition rules after Spotify complaint cnbc.com · “European regulators said Friday that “Apple has a monopoly” in the distribution of music streaming apps to owners of Apple devices.”
Apr 30
The 'Capitalism is Broken' Economy annehelen.substack.com · “Current pay for most of those positions: $10.50 an hour.”
Apr 30
Computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally sciencedaily.com · “Venkat’s team discovered that hackers can steal data when a processor fetches commands from the micro-op cache.”
Apr 30
Flu Has Disappeared for More Than a Year scientificamerican.com · “Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low.”
Apr 29
An update on the UMN affair lwn.net · “The old saying still holds true: one should not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”
Apr 29
RotaJakiro: A long live secret backdoor with 0 VT detection blog.netlab.360.com · “We named it RotaJakiro based on the fact that the family uses rotate encryption and behaves differently for root/non-root accounts when executing.”
Apr 29
What's Going On, Apple? - Part 2 intuitibits.com · “Unfortunately, packet capturing is now broken in the new M1 Mac.”
Apr 29
Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins Dies npr.org · “Unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon.”
Apr 28
Never run Google ads if you have an Android app danfabulich.medium.com · “If Google decides to ban you from AdMob/AdSense, they may also ban your Android app from the Google Play Store.”
Apr 28
Better air quality is the easiest way not to die dynomight.net · “While most things that clearly improve health are well known, one is insanely underrated: Fixing your air.”
Apr 28
Security firm Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware therecord.media · “Lamberts is the internal codename that Kaspersky uses to track CIA hacking operations.”
Apr 28
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California signal.org · “Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, the broad set of personal information that is typically easy to retrieve in other apps simply doesn’t exist on Signal’s servers.”
Apr 28
My current HTML boilerplate matuzo.at · “For the old-schoolers among you, you don’t need any of the other doc types you’ve learned by heart.”
Apr 27
Google Have Declared DroidScript Is Malware and Accused Us of Ad Fraud! groups.google.com · “The Google Play system has declared DroidScript is Malware and accused us of committing Ad Fraud!”
Apr 27
Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private, But It Wasn’t themarkup.org · “California governor Gavin Newsom endorsed his state’s version of the app, calling it “100% private & secure” in a tweet last December.”
Apr 27
Stunning DDT dump site off L.A. coast much bigger than scientists expected latimes.com · “The dumpsite, it turned out, was much, much bigger than expected.”
Apr 27
Changes at Basecamp world.hey.com · “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.”
Apr 26
Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could become first-ever home cure for COVID-19 montrealgazette.com · “Up to 60 volunteers, all clean-living adults aged between 18 and 60, are being given the first pill specifically designed to stop Covid-19.”
Apr 26
Farming Robot Kills 100,000 Weeds per Hour With Lasers freethink.com · “Carbon Robotics has unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers.”
Apr 26
Experian's Credit Freeze Security is Still a Joke krebsonsecurity.com · “Experian’s page for retrieving someone’s credit freeze PIN requires little more information than has already been leaked by big-three bureau Equifax and a myriad other breaches.”
Apr 26
Lambda School Reaches Settlement with DFPI, Agreeing to End Deceptive Educational Financing Practices dfpi.ca.gov · “Lambda is a coding school that offers its California students the option of financing the cost of the program through a contract by which students defer tuition until they begin working in a specified job earning a specific income.”
Apr 26
Feynman's Nobel Ambition asc.ohio-state.edu · “Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.”
Apr 25
Has UML Died Without Anyone Noticing? garba.org · “A few years later, maybe around 2015-ish, I realised that I had pretty much stopped using UML, and so had the rest of my peers and nearly every Fortune 500 customer I have consulted for recently.”
Apr 25
Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: How I Learned To Love Tail Calls in C blog.reverberate.org · “Applying this technique to protobuf parsing has yielded amazing results: we have managed to demonstrate protobuf parsing at over 2GB/s, more than double the previous state of the art.”
Apr 25
Hundreds lose internet service in northern B.C. after beaver chews through cable cbc.ca · “Internet service was down for about 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after a beaver chewed through a crucial fibre cable, causing “extensive” damage.”
Apr 25
Earth Restored tobyord.com · “It wasn’t that Earth itself was any less beautiful, but that there were no photographs which did justice to that beauty.”
Apr 24
Remote code execution in Homebrew by compromising the official Cask repository blog.ryotak.me · “In the Homebrew/homebrew-cask repository, it was possible to merge the malicious pull request by confusing the library that is used in the automated pull request review script developed by the Homebrew project.”
Apr 24
Starting this newsletter, print debugging, BYOC buttondown.email · “I don’t totally disagree, but I do want to point out that print debugging has one critical feature that most step-based debuggers don’t have: you can see program state from multiple time steps all at once.”
Apr 24
‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world theguardian.com · “In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity.”
Apr 24
Why Lichess will always be free. lichess.org · “Lichess doesn’t do any of that and never will.”
Apr 23
Great Malaria Vaccine News blogs.sciencemag.org · “A year-long trial in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering.”
Apr 23
Apple Is Sued for Telling You That You're "Buying" Movies nofilmschool.com · “You actually have rented them at a higher fee, for a longer time.”
Apr 23
Apple's M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model extremetech.com · “x86 OEMs almost never standardize a product family on a single CPU.”
Apr 23
Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared bbc.co.uk · “Judges have quashed the convictions of 39 former postmasters after the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.”
Apr 23
Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years bbc.com · “He was, after all, condemned to a life without power, sanitation or company.”
Apr 22
EFF Sues Proctorio on Behalf of Student It Falsely Accused of Copyright Infringement to Get Critical Tweets Taken Down eff.org · “Proctorio has responded to public criticism by attacking people who speak out.”
Apr 22
Green Vs. Brown Programming Languages earthly.dev · “Old code is the worst.”
Apr 22
Ubuntu 21.04 is here ubuntu.com · “Ubuntu machines can join an Active Directory (AD) domain at installation for central configuration.”
Apr 22
Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg lore.kernel.org · “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose.”
Apr 21
Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app's perspective signal.org · “By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me.”
Apr 21
The Initial Preview of GUI app support is now available for the Windows Subsystem for Linux devblogs.microsoft.com · “We are proud to announce the first preview of this highly anticipated and open source feature!”
Apr 21
The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act wyden.senate.gov · “To amend section 2702 of title 18, United States Code, to prevent law enforcement and intelligence agencies from obtaining subscriber or customer records in exchange for anything of value, to address communications and records in the possession of intermediary internet service providers, and for other purposes.”
Apr 21
Apple introduces AirTag apple.com · “AirTag is also designed with a set of proactive features that discourage unwanted tracking, an industry first.”
Apr 20
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3 grafana.com · “Going forward, we will be relicensing our core open source projects (Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo) from the Apache License 2.0 to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.”
Apr 20
MAINTAINERS: update git.kernel.org · “You are an IBM employee 100% of the time.”
Apr 20
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award Sponsored by YouTube newsweek.com · “YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a “Free Expression” award from the Freedom Forum Institute in a virtual ceremony sponsored by YouTube, an online video platform owned by Google.”
Apr 20
Granny Knot Info fieggen.com · “These are both signs of a Granny Knot.”
Apr 19
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III rosenzweig.io · “Progress has been rapid: at the end of its first week, it can compile both basic vertex and fragment shaders, sufficient to render 3D scenes.”
Apr 19
All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers ndss-symposium.org · “Using an accurate database of mobile phone number prefixes and very few resources, we have queried 10 % of US mobile phone numbers for WhatsApp and 100 % for Signal.”
Apr 19
Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times? washingtonmonthly.com · “For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant.”
Apr 19
Announcing Livebook dashbit.co · “We are glad to announce Livebook, an open source web application for writing interactive and collaborative code notebooks in Elixir and implemented with Phoenix LiveView.”
Apr 18
Proposal: Treat FLoC like a security concern make.wordpress.org · “WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web – and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with a few lines of code.”
Apr 18
'No one was driving the car': 2 men dead after fiery Tesla crash near The Woodlands, officials say click2houston.com · “The accident has made national headlines because local officials investigating the accident say no one was driving the vehicle.”
Apr 18
Huawei was able to eavesdrop on Dutch mobile network KPN: Report nltimes.nl · “Huawei also knew which numbers were tapped by police and intelligence services.”
Apr 18
Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit! madned.substack.com · “They held a little secret bonus award meeting, and we found that we each would be receiving a bonus total of $2000.”
Apr 17
5G: The outsourced elephant in the room berthub.eu · “Driven by balance-sheet mechanics and consultants, service providers have been highly incentivised to outsource anything that could possibly be outsourced, and then some.”
Apr 17
Internet Search Tips gwern.net · “For most people, if it’s not the first hit in Google/Google Scholar, it doesn’t exist.”
Apr 17
Everything Easy is Hard Again frankchimero.com · “I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all.”
Apr 17
Re: [PATCH 00/13] [RFC] Rust support lkml.org · “Running out of memory simply MUST NOT cause an abort.”
Apr 16
Luca App: CCC calls for an immediate moratorium ccc.de · “The unending series of security problems and the vendor’s heavy-handed responses are evidence of a fundamental lack of competence and care.”
Apr 16
Google misled consumers about the collection and use of location data accc.gov.au · “The Court ruled that when consumers created a new Google Account during the initial set-up process of their Android device, Google misrepresented that the ‘Location History’ setting was the only Google Account setting that affected whether Google collected, kept or used personally identifiable data about their location.”
Apr 16
A New Threat to New York’s Clean Energy Goals: Bitcoin Mining nysfocus.com · “But today, Greenidge is back up and running as a Bitcoin mining operation.”
Apr 16
Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years blog.google · “With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience.”
Apr 15
High quality audio makes you sound smarter tips.ariyh.com · “People rated a physicist’s talk as 19.3% better when they listened to it in high (vs low) audio quality.”
Apr 15
Use DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome spreadprivacy.com · “Google has created a new tracking method called FLoC, put it in Chrome, and automatically turned it on for millions of users.”
Apr 15
SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases unixsheikh.com · “SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is.”
Apr 15
Cannot post to YouTube for a week (got a strike) because I included link to legitimate PhD research on KRACK WPA2 vulnerability reddit.com · “I appealed on December 10th 2020 and never heard back to this day.”
Apr 14
Coinbase from YC to IPO blog.ycombinator.com · “We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.”
Apr 14
[PATCH 00/13] [RFC] Rust support lkml.org · “We know there are huge costs and risks in introducing a new main language in the kernel.”
Apr 14
Bitcoin Is a ‘Boon for Surveillance’, Says Former CIA Director decrypt.co · “The technology behind Bitcoin is a “boon for surveillance” and shouldn’t be shunned by governments but embraced, according to an ex-CIA boss.”
Apr 14
Just Be Rich keenen.xyz · “Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn’t mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s.”
Apr 13
Deno 1.9 Release Notes deno.com · “Ultimately we don’t want to be in the business of writing HTTP servers.”
Apr 13
COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 blog.system76.com · “During user testing, we found that even GNOME veterans have a tendency to pause in their task after opening the Activities Overview.”
Apr 13
WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal androidpolice.com · “The Hamburg commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, Johannes Caspar, is looking to stop Facebook from aggregating the data from WhatsApp, fearing that the company would use it to expand its marketing and advertising business.”
Apr 13
School custodian refuses to download phone app that monitors location, says it got her fired cbc.ca · “A school custodian says she was fired after refusing to put an app on her phone that checked her location, citing privacy concerns.”
Apr 13
How People Get Rich Now paulgraham.com · “In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance.”
Apr 12
Introducing OpenSearch aws.amazon.com · “Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Apr 12
Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20 billion as it readies deal frenzy axios.com · “The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company, for example, powered the speech recognition engine behind Apple’s voice assistant, Siri.”
Apr 12
RMS addresses the free software community fsf.org · “Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them – especially women.”
Apr 12
C++ std::unique_ptr that represents each object as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain github.com · “As we all know, adding blockchain to a problem automatically makes it simple, transparent, and cryptographically secure.”
Apr 11
The Ponzi Career drorpoleg.com · “Masmej recruited other humans to share the risks of his early career in exchange for a share of the rewards.”
Apr 11
Google’s lawyer accidentally made a sensitive document public mattstoller.substack.com · “In a response to the complaint of a group of state attorney generals, Google’s lawyers - Paul Yetter at Yetter Coleman - filed a response, but accidentally forgot to redact critical information.”
Apr 11
15 Technologies I Thought My Son Would Never Use tomshardware.com · “Looking at my listicle proves that I have no future as a futurist.”
Apr 11
Everyone Is Still Terrible At Creating Software At Scale margint.blog · “Things that would take yourself maybe a couple of days to do in a way that sort of works become projects that span months or years in the enterprise.”
Apr 10
Best practices for writing SQL queries metabase.com · “The standard warning against premature optimization applies here.”
Apr 10
Setting up Starlink, SpaceX's Satellite Internet jeffgeerling.com · “Apparently it’s smaller than 60 miles.”
Apr 10
Google does not want you to tell your players about your donation page agateau.com · “I added a link to my donation page within the game, depriving Google of some precious money it totally cannot survive without!”
Apr 10
Embrace the Grind jacobian.org · “The trick is all in the preparation.”
Apr 9
Docker without Docker fly.io · “As far as we’re concerned, a container image is just a stack of tarballs and a blob of configuration (we layer additional configuration in as well).”
Apr 9
Zoom zero-day discovery makes calls safer, hackers $200,000 richer blog.malwarebytes.com · “The vulnerabilities require no interaction of the victim.”
Apr 9
CPU algorithm trains deep neural nets up to 15 times faster than top GPU trainers techxplore.com · “Rice University computer scientists have demonstrated artificial intelligence (AI) software that runs on commodity processors and trains deep neural networks 15 times faster than platforms based on graphics processors.”
Apr 9
The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup anthonynsimon.com · “I use Kubernetes on AWS, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need this.”
Apr 8
The Real Book 99percentinvisible.org · “The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication.”
Apr 8
An Interview With the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to WikiFeet thecut.com · “We spoke for nearly an hour, almost entirely about feet.”
Apr 8
New Mexico Governor Signs Historic Legislation to End Qualified Immunity innocenceproject.org · “Today, New Mexico became the second state in the nation to abolish qualified immunity when Governor Lujan Grisham signed the New Mexico Civil Rights Act into law.”
Apr 8
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible? news.ycombinator.com · “The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore.”
Apr 7
Et Tu, Signal? stephendiehl.com · “It’s an old scam with a new face.”
Apr 7
Particle mystery deepens, as physicists confirm that the muon is more magnetic than predicted sciencemag.org · “That’s nowhere near physicists’ standard for claiming a discovery: five times the total uncertainty.”
Apr 7
Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities theconversation.com · “Strikingly, people who cycled on a daily basis had 84% lower carbon emissions from all their daily travel than those who didn’t.”
Apr 7
I Refused to Become an FBI Informant, and the Government Put Me on the No Fly List aclu.org · “But the government won’t even give me its reason for putting me on the No Fly List, any evidence it thinks might justify an indefinite flying ban, or a hearing to clear my name.”
Apr 6
Breaking GitHub Private Pages for $35k robertchen.cc · “At $35,000, it’s also the highest bounty I’ve received so far from HackerOne (and I believe the highest GitHub has paid out to date).”
Apr 6
Please don’t make me go back: Some of the reasons I hope work from home continues and I never have to return to an office ryanmercer.com · “Do not have to go to work sick, because they act like you murdered 30 children if you call in sick.”
Apr 6
Programming is hard dorinlazar.ro · “Just because I can mix three things in an omelette that doesn’t make me a top chef.”
Apr 6
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. supremecourt.gov · “Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use.”
Apr 5
Writing tools I learned from The Economist builtbywords.substack.com · “Losing the thread is the most predictable writing mistake: we stray from our point and dwell on what we think is worth mentioning at the moment.”
Apr 5
LG is getting out of the mobile phone business axios.com · “LG was once one of those, but hasn’t been for many years, and had no clear path to change that.”
Apr 5
Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021 uk.help.yahoo.com · “If you try to access Yahoo Answers on May 4th you’ll be redirected to the Yahoo homepage.”
Apr 5
Novel HIV vaccine approach shows promise in "landmark" trial europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com · “According to the organisations, the vaccine successfully stimulated the production of the rare immune cells needed to generate antibodies against HIV in 97 percent of participants.”
Apr 4
I thought I was dying: My apartment was built on toxic waste sfbayview.com · “I was living on a remediation site but didn’t know it until I was so sick that I thought I could be dying.”
Apr 4
How to bypass CloudFlare bot protection ? jychp.medium.com · “According to them, this is not a problem, it’s up to you to make up your own mind.”
Apr 4
How Did Microsoft Make Flight Simulator Seem So Real? airspacemag.com · “Last August, Microsoft released the latest version of its Flight Simulator, extending the run of that franchise to 38 years and making it the longest-running product line in Microsoft’s history.”
Apr 4
533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online businessinsider.com · “A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data had been scraped because of a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.”
Apr 3
How Doctors Die saturdayeveningpost.com · “Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor.”
Apr 3
My NAS exposes itself over the internet without permission kn100.me · “A few days after installing the NAS, I discovered I could access the NAS using my public IP, even though I hadn’t port forwarded anything!”
Apr 3
Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors guzey.com · “The WHO never declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations.”
Apr 3
This man thought opening a TXT file is fine, he thought wrong. macOS CVE-2019-8761 paulosyibelo.com · “TXT files are also assumed by anti-virus software, firewalls, and even Mac’s own Gatekeeper as safe downloads that can’t possibly be malicious.”
Apr 2
This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem nns.ee · “It turns out the modem runs its own OS totally separate from the rest of the PinePhone OS.”
Apr 2
The Norway Problem - why StrictYAML refuses to do implicit typing and so should you hitchdev.com · “It snows a lot in False.”
Apr 2
Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side cfenollosa.com · “I ended up using Thunderbird, but I felt like I was doing my email with handcuffs.”
Apr 2
Latest EmDrive tests at Dresden University shows "impossible Engine" does not develop any thrust grenzwissenschaft-aktuell.de · “Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude.”
Apr 1
Zero click vulnerability in Apple's macOS Mail mikko-kenttala.medium.com · “An attacker can modify victim’s Mail configuration including mail redirects which enables takeover of victim’s other accounts via password resets.”
Apr 1
Massive security breach at US universities dorper.me · “The hackers are holding the universities at ransom.”
Apr 1
A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16 advancedweb.hu · “Since the release of version 8, up to version 16, Java is shaped by 180 JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs), each of which brings some improvement to the platform.”
Apr 1

March 2021 125 posts

Inside a viral website notfunatparties.substack.com · “The website received around 50 million views in a 5 day period.”
Mar 31
signed char lotte nickdrozd.github.io · “The cleverness of the text is staggering.”
Mar 31
Jump in cancer diagnoses at 65 implies patients wait for Medicare, according to Stanford study med.stanford.edu · “A quick exploratory analysis of their own practices showed a twofold increase in lung cancer surgeries in 65-year-old patients compared with 64-year-olds.”
Mar 31
up - the Ultimate Plumber github.com · “In particular, writing “rm” or “dd” into it could be like running around with a chainsaw.”
Mar 31
Font size is useless; let's fix it tonsky.me · “Instead, macOS always uses 72 PPI to convert points to pixels.”
Mar 30
'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter bbc.com · “Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake.”
Mar 30
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS therecord.media · “Academic research published last week looked at the telemetry traffic sent by modern iOS and Android devices back to Apple and Google servers and found that Google collects around 20 times more telemetry data from Android devices than Apple from iOS.”
Mar 30
Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images unsplash.com · “This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.”
Mar 30
Assemblies of putative SARS-CoV2-spike-encoding mRNA sequences for vaccines BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 github.com · “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNAs.”
Mar 29
Announcing the Deno Company deno.com · “Deno is our attempt to breathe new life into this ecosystem.”
Mar 29
Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time axios.com · “It’s the first time in the eight decades that Gallup has tracked the trend that a majority of Americans do not belong to a church.”
Mar 29
Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface twitter.com · “Hey @Ubiquiti, why are you pushing ads on the management interface for hardware I bought outright?”
Mar 29
Changes to Git commit workflow news-web.php.net · “While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server.”
Mar 29
Men Clamming Up femfosec.com · “When this happens, women are missing out on potentially valuable advice.”
Mar 28
I made an eInk newspaper gregraiz.com · “It’s silent, wireless and can run for months without being plugged in.”
Mar 28
Developer tools can be magic. Instead, they collect dust. pathsensitive.com · “In spite of this, tools research is still light-years ahead of what’s being deployed.”
Mar 28
Deep Daze github.com · “Credit goes to Ryan Murdock for the discovery of this technique (and for coming up with the great name)!”
Mar 28
Louvre site des collections collections.louvre.fr · “The Collections database consists of entries for more than 500,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix.”
Mar 27
FileZilla now contains adware if you download from the official homepage twitter.com · “FileZilla now contains adware if you download from the official homepage.”
Mar 27
Experience: I tracked down my impostor theguardian.com · “This man had been stealing my work and elements of my identity for years.”
Mar 27
Ohm github.com · “Unlike many similar tools, Ohm completely separates grammars from semantic actions.”
Mar 27
Google's Got A Secret knuckleheads.club · “Anybody who has ever written a web crawler knows that Googlebot gets more access than everybody else.”
Mar 26
The Drivers Cooperative drivers.coop · “We are a driver-owned cooperative in New York City specializing in paratransit and Non-Emergency Medical Transportation.”
Mar 26
APT Encounters of the Third Kind igor-blue.github.io · “A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind.”
Mar 26
If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You're More Likely to Be Happy at Work hbr.org · “Our research suggests there’s truth behind this saying: bosses matter far more for employee job satisfaction than any other factor we measured.”
Mar 26
Is that ship still stuck? istheshipstillstuck.com · “It (probably) cost “us” $59 billion.”
Mar 25
Why All My Servers Have an 8GB Empty File brianschrader.com · “As of last year, all of my servers have an 8GB empty spacer.img file that does absolutely nothing except take up space.”
Mar 25
SQLite is not a toy database antonz.org · “SQLite is the most common DBMS in the world, shipped with all popular operating systems.”
Mar 25
Rest In Peace Google Reader ripgooglereader.com · “Even though many people loved and depended on Google Reader, Google still killed it.”
Mar 25
Addon Unavailable on Google Chrome github.com · “The mention of all the people who helped to develop and translate ClearURLs is against Google’s rules because it could “confuse” the user.”
Mar 24
The Solution of the Zodiac Killer's 340-Character Cipher blog.wolfram.com · “This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.”
Mar 24
Emoji under the hood tonsky.me · “Out of those 2 million, actually defined are ~150k characters.”
Mar 24
Firefox 87 introduces SmartBlock for Private Browsing blog.mozilla.org · “SmartBlock ensures that strong privacy protections in Firefox are accompanied by a great web browsing experience.”
Mar 24
Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace! bell-labs.com · “The plan was not to build directly on the Unix foundation but to implement a new design from scratch.”
Mar 23
A safer default for navigation: HTTPS blog.chromium.org · “This was a practical default in the past, when much of the web did not support HTTPS.”
Mar 23
Substack's UI and 1Password just cost me $2,023 timmyomahony.com · “As part of a Zoom call today, I tried to sign up for a $10 monthly subscription on a Substack page to test the user journey.”
Mar 23
RFC 8996: Deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 datatracker.ietf.org · “TLS version 1.2 became the recommended version for IETF protocols in 2008 (subsequently being obsoleted by TLS version 1.3 in 2018), providing sufficient time to transition away from older versions.”
Mar 23
Backblaze submitting names and sizes of files in B2 buckets to Facebook twitter.com · “I even opted out of their tracking widget thing!”
Mar 22
Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy blog.mozilla.org · “From now on, by default, Firefox will trim path and query string information from referrer headers to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data.”
Mar 22
Crystal 1.0 - What to expect crystal-lang.org · “After this release, everyone can expect that, at least for any future 1.x version, your code can still compile and work without any significant incompatibility.”
Mar 22
The S in IOT is for Security puri.sm · “You also have to agree to the terms of service to install and use the application.”
Mar 22
Richard Stallman is Coming Back to the Board of the Free Software Foundation, Founded by Himself 35 Years Ago techrights.org · “He’s not president but he’s on the board.”
Mar 21
Don't End The Week With Nothing training.kalzumeus.com · “I worked 70 to 90 hour weeks for three years.”
Mar 21
GPT Neo github.com · “NB, while neo can technically run a training step at 200B+ parameters, it is very inefficient at those scales.”
Mar 21
SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme sfgate.com · “The federal indictment states that uBiome sought upwards of $300 million in reimbursement claims from private and public health insurers between 2015 and 2019.”
Mar 21
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net · “The decision acknowledges the long and living tradition the Demoscene has in Germany, with Revision, Breakpoint, and Evoke among other demoparties shaping the landscape of major international gatherings of the demoscene for decades.”
Mar 20
Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore lwgmnz.me · “I have to scroll up with my left thumb and then tap Refresh on my right.”
Mar 20
The Invention of a New Pasta Shape kottke.org · “Pashman and Sfoglini engineered the new shape to maximize the amount of sauce that sticks to it, make it easier to get your fork on it, and have it feel good when you bite into it.”
Mar 20
Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modify microcode twitter.com · “Wow, we (+@h0t_max and @_Dmit) have found two undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs which completely control microarchitectural state (yes, they can modify microcode)”
Mar 20
Young female Japanese biker is really 50-year-old man with luscious hair using FaceApp mothership.sg · “According to a Japanese variety show, the rider turned out to be a 50-year-old man who makes use of a phone app to transform his looks.”
Mar 19
Nyxt browser: The hacker's browser nyxt.atlas.engineer · “A tree based history ensures that you never lose track of where you’ve been.”
Mar 19
Tesla's "Full Self Driving" Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous roadandtrack.com · “It appears hapless and utterly confused at all times, never passably imitating a human driver.”
Mar 19
The Art of Warez Documents the Lost ANSI Art Scene juxtapoz.com · “The Art Of Warez covers the days before the Internet when early hackers and online pirates created an original and, even today, a virtually unknown art movement.”
Mar 19
Reddit investors adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days bbc.co.uk · “The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, a charity for the protection of endangered mountain gorillas, has also received more than $350,000 (£252,000) in donations.”
Mar 18
Interview with John Kozubik, rsync.net console.dev · “rsync.net has no firewalls and no routers.”
Mar 18
How we found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling github.blog · “On March 2, 2021, we received a report via our support team from a user who, while using GitHub.com logged in as their own user, was suddenly authenticated as another user.”
Mar 18
Outrun github.com · “Since the remote machine will have full access to your local file system as your current user, make sure to only use machines that you trust.”
Mar 18
Audacity 3.0.0 Released audacityteam.org · “The problem, which happened all too often, was that data files and .aup file parted ways.”
Mar 17
Charts.css chartscss.org · “It uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.”
Mar 17
Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky astroanarchy.blogspot.com · “Total exposure time used is around 1250 hours between 2009 and 2021.”
Mar 17
Boosting developer success on Google Play android-developers.googleblog.com · “With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees.”
Mar 17
Why We Don't Use Docker (We Don't Need It) launchyourapp.meezeeworkouts.com · “We don’t have anywhere close to a thousand transactions per second.”
Mar 16
Ask HN: What are some "10x" software product innovations you have experienced? news.ycombinator.com · “Have you personally experienced such 10x improvements in your own interactions with software?”
Mar 16
Moore's Law for Everything moores.samaltman.com · “Even more power will shift from labor to capital.”
Mar 16
Brain's 'wiring insulation' is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration port.ac.uk · “This new study found that the cells that drive myelin repair become less efficient as we age and identified a key gene that is most affected by ageing, which reduces the cells ability to replace lost myelin.”
Mar 16
Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed poor load times, official update coming pcgamer.com · “Tostercx said that they were awarded $10,000 through Rockstar’s Bug Bounty program.”
Mar 15
A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16 vice.com · “Instead, the hacker used a service by a company called Sakari, which helps businesses do SMS marketing and mass messaging, to reroute my messages to him.”
Mar 15
Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust benhoyt.com · “It’s the kind of thing a programmer might have to write a script for in real life, and it shows whether they understand file I/O, hash tables (maps), and how to use their language’s sort function.”
Mar 15
The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption and Tell Congress About All the Encrypted Phones It's Already Hacking Into eff.org · “Cellebrite can bypass lock screens on about 1,500 different devices.”
Mar 15
security.txt: Proposed standard for defining security policies securitytxt.org · “security.txt defines a standard to help organizations define the process for security researchers to disclose security vulnerabilities securely.”
Mar 14
Satellite Imagery Shows Northern California Kelp Forests Have Collapsed smithsonianmag.com · “A decade ago, hundreds of miles of the rugged seaside were flanked by thick, swaying underwater forests of amber-green bull kelp that were home to fish, abalone and a host of other species.”
Mar 14
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery matthewearl.github.io · “One thing that I found remarkable was the self-similarity of the martian terrain.”
Mar 14
Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar library compared to macOS tar? superuser.com · “I think the underlying issue is that BSD tar and GNU tar without any sort options put the files in the archive in an undefined order.”
Mar 14
dhcpcd will need a new maintainer roy.marples.name · “As such, dhcpcd will soon need a new maintainer.”
Mar 13
Speed of Rust vs C kornel.ski · “Rust’s abstractions are a double-edged sword.”
Mar 13
RethinkDB: why we failed defmacro.org · “In hindsight, two things went wrong – we picked a terrible market and optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness.”
Mar 13
Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts news.harvard.edu · “Despite that, she said, none have completely escaped the body’s post-vaccination immune responses.”
Mar 13
Bitwarden Send bitwarden.com · “Bitwarden Send empowers teams and individuals with a secure, simple way to share information directly with another person.”
Mar 12
What's new in SQLite 3.35 nalgeon.github.io · “Anyway, after 20 years we now have mathematical functions!”
Mar 12
Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack our.status.im · “Miners have strongly opposed this change, as it will significantly decrease their revenue, and they have even went as far as creating a website dedicated to stopping its integration.”
Mar 12
Minister hints at UK departure from GDPR lawgazette.co.uk · “Dowden said that under the regime ’too many businesses and organisations are reluctant to use data – either because they don’t understand the rules or are afraid of inadvertently breaking them’.”
Mar 12
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service tinyprojects.dev · “Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.”
Mar 11
How I earn a living selling my open source software indiehackers.com · “I initially developed open3A because I needed it myself to write invoices to my customers.”
Mar 11
Julia Computing Receives DARPA Award to Accelerate Electronics Simulation by 1,000x juliacomputing.com · “Funding was awarded as part of DARPA’s Intelligent Auto-Generation and Composition of Surrogate Models (Ditto) effort.”
Mar 11
Write Simply paulgraham.com · “If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.”
Mar 11
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building travaux.ovh.net · “Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2.”
Mar 10
Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work theta.eu.org · “In 2021 a lot more of the Rust ecosystem has become asynchronous – such that it might be appropriate to just say that Rust programming is now a disaster and a mess.”
Mar 10
U.S. senators reintroduce bill to make daylight saving time permanent fox8.com · “Florida enacted year-round DST in 2018, but for the change to apply, a change in the federal statute is required.”
Mar 10
Inventor of cassette tape Lou Ottens passed away netherlandsnewslive.com · “More than 100 billion cassettes have been sold since its launch in 1963.”
Mar 10
I want a Computer that I Own misc-stuff.terraaeon.com · “Instead, I have a computer that is designed largely to maximize the profits of the computer industry.”
Mar 9
Hackers breach thousands of security cameras, exposing Tesla, jails, hospitals bnnbloomberg.ca · “In addition, hackers were able to view video from inside women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals and the offices of Verkada itself.”
Mar 9
Write libraries instead of services, where possible catern.com · “A library instead moves these costs to the users of the library.”
Mar 9
git: malicious repositories can execute remote code while cloning openwall.com · “With Git LFS enabled globally, this will print “PWNED” during the clone on case-insensitive file systems with support for symbolic links (such as NTFS, HFS+, etc).”
Mar 9
ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them twitter.com · “ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them, making it impractical for millions of hobbyist programmers to access to them and be able to even understand what the standard is.”
Mar 8
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny bloodknife.com · “We watch actors doing burpees or shaking ropes with expensive personal trainers.”
Mar 8
-2000 Lines Of Code folklore.org · “When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.”
Mar 8
Excel Never Dies notboring.co · “Anyone who has worked in finance or consulting grew up on it, learned to love it over thousands of hours of practice and improvement.”
Mar 8
Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up text.npr.org · “Refuse to sign, and he’d risk his job, his career and the good life he’d built for his wife and four children.”
Mar 7
NFTs are a dangerous trap seths.blog · “They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators.”
Mar 7
Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun kevinlynagh.com · “The experience went so well, in fact, that I now feel just as likely to turn to Zig (a language I’ve used for a dozen hours) as to Rust (which I’ve used for at least a thousand hours).”
Mar 7
Digital identity scheme shot down by voters over data privacy concerns swissinfo.ch · “Final results show 64.4% of voters coming out against the planned law on Sunday.”
Mar 7
Dolt is Git for Data github.com · “Git versions files. Dolt versions tables.”
Mar 6
Burned house horizon en.wikipedia.org · “Although there have been some attempts to try to replicate the results of these ancient settlement burnings, no modern experiment has yet managed to successfully reproduce the conditions that would leave behind the type of evidence that is found in these burned Neolithic sites, had the structures burned under normal conditions.”
Mar 6
Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model erikbern.com · “The median blowup factor turns out to be exactly 1x for this dataset, whereas the mean blowup factor is 1.81x.”
Mar 6
Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia? news.ycombinator.com · “Through my MSc & PhD, I’ve seen a number of abuses of power from supervisors, both my own and others.”
Mar 6
At Least 30,000 U.S. Organizations Newly Hacked Via Holes in Microsoft's Email Software krebsonsecurity.com · “The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.”
Mar 5
Proton Has Enabled 7000 Games to Run on Linux boilingsteam.com · “In other words, for every Windows title out there, there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as expected on Linux.”
Mar 5
Open source projects: consider running office hours simonwillison.net · “A challenge of open source is that it’s easy to be starved of feedback.”
Mar 5
'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker bbc.co.uk · “Images of what appears to be a hovering ship have been captured as the result of a rare optical illusion off the coast of England.”
Mar 5
It Can Happen to You mattkeeter.com · “Replacing the sscanf call with strtof improved startup by nearly a factor of 10: from 1.8 seconds to 199 milliseconds.”
Mar 4
banned.h github.com · “This header lists functions that have been banned from our code base, because they’re too easy to misuse (and even if used correctly, complicate audits).”
Mar 4
Google's FLoC Is a Terrible Idea eff.org · “FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers.”
Mar 4
Senators call on FCC to quadruple base high-speed internet speeds theverge.com · “The federal government’s definition of high-speed broadband has remained stagnant over the last six years, sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015.”
Mar 4
Mars: Nasa's Perseverance rover sends stunning images bbc.com · “The picture was stitched together on Earth from 142 individual images.”
Mar 3
Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version theregister.com · “The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder.”
Mar 3
Killing Turbotax kunle.app · “Even the Justice Department recognizes TurboTax as a functional monopoly, and forced Intuit to sell CreditKarma Tax in order to complete the acquisition.”
Mar 3
ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His 'Background' torrentfreak.com · “Sunde didn’t tick this box, as he was convicted for criminal copyright infringement.”
Mar 3
Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald's, KFC & Pizza Hut agfundernews.com · “The three-year strategic agreement with McDonald’s will see Beyond Meat become the ‘preferred supplier’ of patties for the fast food chain’s new McPlant plant-based burger.”
Mar 2
Apple Card disabled my iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts dcurt.is · “Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.”
Mar 2
Speed is the killer feature bdickason.com · “Latency stops your users from doing the job they already hire your product for.”
Mar 2
Lotus 1-2-3 lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “I had to script a DOS emulator to scrape the data out a page at a time!”
Mar 2
Are Xiaomi browsers spyware? Yes, they are… palant.info · “But they also transmit user’s Xiaomi account ID if they know it, which is directly linked to the user’s identity.”
Mar 1
On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren't residentcontrarian.substack.com · “At the time she leaned on my wife for emotional support over finances, our family of four’s income was less than $30,000 a year.”
Mar 1
Use Touch ID for sudo on Mac davidwalsh.name · “One functionality that still requires manually typing a password is using sudo from command line.”
Mar 1
The Last Message Sent on AIM justanman.org · “I examined the script logs and found it – the last message sent on AIM.”
Mar 1

February 2021 113 posts

Actually Portable Executables ahgamut.github.io · “This is pretty incredible: I just had to modify a few lines in a Makefile and some C source files, and I got a Lua executable that works both on Linux and Windows (and possibly others as well).”
Feb 28
The Mars Helicopter is Online and Getting Ready to Fly universetoday.com · “Earth is the only planet in the solar system with aircraft capable of sustained flight.”
Feb 28
Little League wants all your information honeypot.net · “In other words, you have to upload your most private information and agree to allow them to do as they like with it, including sharing it with whomever they like for any reason they choose.”
Feb 28
Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with blog.yossarian.net · “Program packagers and distributors (frequently separate from project maintainers themselves) are very used to C’s universal presence.”
Feb 28
A Vim Guide for Advanced Users thevaluable.dev · “Don’t use a cheatsheet; write your own as you read.”
Feb 27
fake_contacts: Create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning github.com · “This feeds fake data to any apps or companies who are copying our private data to use or sell it.”
Feb 27
Are you trading or gambling? investinglessons.substack.com · “Gambling occurs when you have a poor understanding of risk, resulting in either (1) negative expected value bets, or (2) poor bet sizing that leads to ruin.”
Feb 27
a new chapter: full-time working from a van in a forest ghuntley.com · “Over the course of five years more than $110,000 had been spent on rent at that dumpster of a house.”
Feb 27
redbean justine.lol · “redbean can serve 1 million+ gzip encoded responses per second on a cheap personal computer.”
Feb 26
Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are tracked bnnbloomberg.ca · “Broome’s attempt to downplay the privacy concerns by pointing out that the federal court system’s own website uses Google services ended up backfiring.”
Feb 26
Why Is Facebook Launching An All-Out War On Apple's Upcoming iPhone Update? npr.org · “In the coming weeks, Apple will update its iOS software for iPhones to require apps to get explicit consent to track what people are doing on their phones for the purposes of sharing it with third parties.”
Feb 26
Google admits Kubernetes container tech is so complex, it's had to roll out an Autopilot feature to do it all for you theregister.com · ““Despite 6 years of progress, Kubernetes is still incredibly complex,” said Drew Bradstock, product lead for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).”
Feb 26
Introducing the Framework Laptop frame.work · “The single best way to reduce the environmental impact of electronics is to make them last longer.”
Feb 25
GamestonkTerminal: The next best thing after Bloomberg Terminal github.com · “Gamestonk Terminal is an awesome stock market terminal that has been developed for fun, while I saw my GME shares tanking.”
Feb 25
Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast casparwre.de · “Google is a giant advertising platform.”
Feb 25
Amazon Sends 'Vote NO' Instructions to Unionizing Employees, Tells Them to Use New Mailbox vice.com · “A USPS mailbox intended for mailing union ballots was recently installed just feet from where Amazon workers exit and enter the warehouse, a move that workers say makes them feel surveilled in the election, which is supposed to be anonymous.”
Feb 25
The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed forbes.com · “The 25-ton stealth warplane has become the very problem it was supposed to solve.”
Feb 24
Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison kevinslin.com · “The initial onboarding call was entirely about how much money I was planning on spending with google (as opposed to the Amazon call where they wanted to help me architect my service).”
Feb 24
Everyday Data Science andrewnc.github.io · “During my graduate studies, I have been enthralled with how books often stay relevant and how quickly papers sink into obscurity.”
Feb 24
Building an E-Ink Laptop alexsoto.dev · “And while e-ink has been around for 24 years, we have yet to see a laptop with an e-ink panel.”
Feb 24
Firefox 86 Introduces Total Cookie Protection blog.mozilla.org · “Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.”
Feb 23
Attorney General James Ends Virtual Currency Trading Platform Bitfinex's Illegal Activities in New York ag.ny.gov · “Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie.”
Feb 23
How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies blog.haschek.at · “So at the time I was making about 3.8$ profit a day with the miner.”
Feb 23
How Canadians Derailed a Train and Drove It to City Hall for Power After a Brutal Ice Storm thedrive.com · “Rather than leave town, though, one Canadian mayor stepped up to bring in the biggest mobile power generators they could get their hands on: Diesel-electric freight train locomotives.”
Feb 23
Daft Punk Break Up pitchfork.com · “Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk in Paris in 1993, helping to define the French touch style of house music.”
Feb 22
Whistleblowers: Software bug keeping hundreds of inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates kjzz.org · “As of 2019, the department had spent more than $24 million contracting with IT company Business & Decision, North America to build and maintain the software program, known as ACIS, that is used to manage the inmate population in state prisons.”
Feb 22
We haven't seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s nationalgeographic.com · “Bees in the rare Melittidae family, which provide us with blueberries, cranberries, and orchids, have plummeted by as much as 41 percent.”
Feb 22
Go is not an easy language arp242.net · “Go is not an easy programming language.”
Feb 22
Choose Boring Technology boringtechnology.club · “Let’s say that we all get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend.”
Feb 21
Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager css-tricks.com · “One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that humans aren’t pure functions: an input that works one day and gets one result, then again another day and get an entirely different result.”
Feb 21
YouTube AI Blocked Chess Channel after Confusing 'Black' and 'White' for Racist Slurs news18.com · “The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.”
Feb 21
A dishonest, indifferent, and toxic culture of the University of Florida huixiangvoice.medium.com · “The review process for his ISCA-2019 paper was broken, and most of the reviewers of the paper are “friends” of his advisor Dr. Tao Li.”
Feb 21
Iceberger joshdata.me · “Icebergs are less dense than water, so they always float with about 10% of their mass above the water.”
Feb 20
Incident: United B772 at Denver on Feb 20th 2021, engine inlet separates from engine, engine fire avherald.com · “The engine inlet fell into the neighbourhood of Broomfield,CO, located about 16nm west of Denver near 13th and Elmwood Street, the debris also struck through the roof of an adjacent house.”
Feb 20
How can you not be romantic about programming? thorstenball.com · “We spend large parts of our days writing down instructions for machines.”
Feb 20
The modern packager's security nightmare blogs.gentoo.org · “Today, for every 10 packages fixed, a completely new ecosystem emerges with the bad security practices at its central point.”
Feb 20
Monolith First martinfowler.com · “Almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.”
Feb 19
Unsealed court document claims Facebook 'knew for years' that a metric was inflated and ignored an employee warning to avoid a revenue hit news.yahoo.com · “The lawsuit claims Facebook discovered removing duplicate or fake accounts from the total number would cause a 10% drop in potential reach numbers.”
Feb 19
"I will slaughter you" daniel.haxx.se · “Code I have written runs in virtually every Internet connected device on the planet and in most cases the users download and use it without even telling me, for free.”
Feb 19
Uber drivers are workers not self-employed, Supreme Court rules bbc.co.uk · “The decision could mean thousands of Uber drivers are entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay.”
Feb 19
GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine blogs.nvidia.com · “RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
Feb 18
Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software security.googleblog.com · “To date, our free OSS-Fuzz service has found over 5,500 vulnerabilities across 375 open source projects caused by memory safety errors, and our Rewards Program helps encourage adoption of fuzzing through financial incentives.”
Feb 18
Zsh Tricks to Blow your Mind twilio.com · “Starting with MacOS Catalina in 2019, Zsh became the default login and interactive shell in Mac machines.”
Feb 18
Statement: California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics maps.org · “The bill would decriminalize MDMA, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, psilocyn, ibogaine, and mescaline and create a commission to recommend frameworks for legal psychedelic use.”
Feb 18
Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? paygo.media · “The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.”
Feb 17
always bet on text graydon2.dreamwidth.org · “Text is the most efficient communication technology.”
Feb 17
Cell Tower Distribution alpercinar.com · “Since there are no cell towers in oceans or uninhabitable areas, tiles for those regions are full of zero values or very sparse.”
Feb 17
IKEA to Discontinue Its Annual Catalog, Ending a 70-Year Run architecturaldigest.com · “At 40 million copies, its circulation is only about 20% of what it had been just five years earlier.”
Feb 17
Changes to Sharing and Viewing News on Facebook in Australia about.fb.com · “In response to Australia’s proposed new Media Bargaining law, Facebook will restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.”
Feb 17
What I Worked On paulgraham.com · “My stories were awful.”
Feb 16
Functorio bartoszmilewski.com · “You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style.”
Feb 16
What went wrong with the Texas power grid? houstonchronicle.com · “Natural gas shortages and frozen wind turbines were already curtailing power output when the Arctic blast began knocking generators offline early Monday morning.”
Feb 16
Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online bbc.com · “These included “packages” of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about £15 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at £620 for 50 reviews and going up to £8,000 for 1,000.”
Feb 16
UsTaxes: Tax filing web application github.com · “UsTaxes is a free, open-source tax filing application that can be used to file the Federal 1040 form.”
Feb 15
Faster JavaScript calls v8.dev · “It turns out that, with a clever trick, we can remove this extra frame, simplify the V8 codebase and get rid of almost the entire overhead.”
Feb 15
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day righto.com · “Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds.”
Feb 15
Spotify says it's letting employees work from anywhere, while still paying San Francisco and New York salaries businessinsider.com · “Spotify said it would continue to pay at San Francisco or New York salary rates, based on the type of job.”
Feb 15
GTA III and Vice City fully reverse engineered: re3 github.com · “In this repository you’ll find the fully reversed source code for GTA III (master branch) and GTA VC (miami branch).”
Feb 14
K-9 Mail is looking for funding k9mail.app · “K-9 Mail is looking to raise 1,000 EUR per week (~52,000 EUR per year) to fund development.”
Feb 14
The complexity that lives in the GUI blog.royalsloth.eu · “There are all sorts of libraries and frameworks that are supposed to help you on your journey of writing a GUI, but despite all the best practices and frameworks forcing you to eat your vegetables, the GUI always ends up being a ridiculous mess.”
Feb 14
Half Doses of Moderna Produce Neutralizing Antibodies marginalrevolution.com · “As I wrote earlier, halving the dose is equivalent to instantly doubling the output of every Moderna factory.”
Feb 14
50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat npr.org · “The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.”
Feb 13
How Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us A Pioneer Of mRNA Vaccines wbur.org · “She tried again and again to win grants, and each time, her applications were rejected.”
Feb 13
Ziglings: Learn the Zig programming language by fixing tiny broken programs github.com · “This project contains a series of tiny broken programs.”
Feb 13
Welcoming Google as a Visionary Sponsor of the PSF pyfound.blogspot.com · “Google has been a Python Software Foundation sponsor since 2010.”
Feb 13
Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down github.com · “Swift for TensorFlow was an experiment in the next-generation platform for machine learning, incorporating the latest research across machine learning, compilers, differentiable programming, systems design, and beyond.”
Feb 12
Self-Organising Textures distill.pub · “A system of individual agents running the same learned local rule can solve surprisingly complex tasks.”
Feb 12
Apple redirects Google Safe Browsing traffic through its own proxy servers to prevent disclosing users' IP addresses to Google in iOS 14.5 the8-bit.com · “A perfect example is the new privacy feature in iOS 14.5 Beta 1 (V2) which redirects Google Safe Browsing traffic through Apple’s own proxy servers to enhance users’ privacy and to not let Google see your IP address.”
Feb 12
Short fat engineers are undervalued nested.substack.com · “Depth helps you move fast, but breadth helps you move in the right direction.”
Feb 12
Beej's Guide to Network Programming beej.us · “This document has been written as a tutorial, not a complete reference.”
Feb 11
Is an $800 purifier best to clean your home's air? Marketplace tested 5 top brands and their claims cbc.ca · “The Dysons we tested averaged a CADR of about 140 m3/hour, lower than most of the other air purifiers we tested, and well below the approximately 200 m3/hr Siegel recommends for cleaning small to medium-sized rooms.”
Feb 11
Why I Built Litestream litestream.io · “Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago.”
Feb 11
Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel engineering.skroutz.gr · “What’s more, this bug had been present in Linux since v2.1.8, dating back to 1996!”
Feb 11
Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies medium.com · “This type of vulnerability, which I have started calling dependency confusion, was detected inside more than 35 organizations to date, across all three tested programming languages.”
Feb 10
Viral 'I'm not a cat' filter is decades-old software bbc.co.uk · “But it is a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops.”
Feb 10
What's most interesting about the Florida water system hack? That we heard about it at all. krebsonsecurity.com · “In short, a likely inexperienced intruder somehow learned the credentials needed to remotely access Oldsmar’s water system, did little to hide his activity, and then tried to change settings by such a wide margin that the alterations would be hard to overlook.”
Feb 10
8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories npr.org · “NPR’s archivists found the word “dinosaur” appearing in stories 294 times in the show’s history.”
Feb 10
GitHub1s: One second to read GitHub code with VS Code github.com · “Just add 1s after github and press Enter in browser address bar for any repository you want to read.”
Feb 9
Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime's 'Santeria' to Avoid Being Live-Streamed? vice.com · “Any video that contains music, even if it’s playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram.”
Feb 9
How Lyft discovered OpenStreetMap is the Freshest Map for Rideshare eng.lyft.com · “OpenStreetMap has a very high-quality road network in 30 large North American cities.”
Feb 9
[Python-Dev] Acceptance of Pattern Matching PEPs 634, 635, 636, Rejection of PEPs 640 and 642 lwn.net · “After much deliberation, the Python Steering Council is happy to announce that we have chosen to accept PEP 634, and its companion PEPs 635 and 636, collectively known as the Pattern Matching PEPs.”
Feb 9
Investigate unusual media traffic pattern for AsterNovi-belgii-flower-1mb.jpg on Commons phabricator.wikimedia.org · “We’ve noticed today that we get about 90M requests per day from various ISPs in India, all with the same characteristics:”
Feb 8
Hello World! foundation.rust-lang.org · “Mozilla, the original home of the Rust project, has transferred all trademark and infrastructure assets, including the crates.io package registry, to the Rust Foundation.”
Feb 8
Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update blog.malwarebytes.com · “It is frightening that with one update an app can turn malicious while going under the radar of Google Play Protect.”
Feb 8
Tesla buys $1.5B in bitcoin, may accept the cryptocurrency as payment in the future techcrunch.com · “As the news broke, the price of bitcoin instantly rose by around 7% to more than $40,000 per coin.”
Feb 8
Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit used by police theregister.com · “The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.”
Feb 7
Visual guide to SSH tunnels robotmoon.com · “SSH tunnels are encrypted TCP connections between SSH clients and servers that allows traffic entering one side of the tunnel to transparently exit through the other.”
Feb 7
Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon github.com · “The tracking method works even in the browser’s incognito mode and is not cleared by flushing the cache, closing the browser or restarting the operating system, using a VPN or installing AdBlockers.”
Feb 7
Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass cbc.ca · “The new technique is so cheap and easy it could literally be done in a backyard.”
Feb 7
ARCHITECTURE.md matklad.github.io · “Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.”
Feb 6
How to lower the price of plant-based meat us14.campaign-archive.com · “The average price for meat alternatives sold in US grocers’ meat departments last year was $9.87/lb, twice the average price of beef ($4.82/lb), and fourfold the average price of chicken ($2.33/lb).”
Feb 6
Big name corporations more likely to commit fraud news.wsu.edu · “Fortune 500 firms with strong growth profiles are more susceptible to “cooking the books” than smaller, struggling companies, according to a recent study published in Justice Quarterly.”
Feb 6
Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened? singhkays.com · “2007, 2008, and 2009 are basically clones of each other.”
Feb 6
Homebrew 3.0.0 brew.sh · “The most significant changes since 2.7.0 are official Apple Silicon support and a new bottle format in formulae.”
Feb 5
In the first six months of health care professionals replacing police officers, no one they encountered was arrested denverite.com · “In its first six months, the Support Team Assisted Response program, or STAR, has responded to 748 incidents.”
Feb 5
Disqus, the dark commenting system web.archive.org · “Disqus makes 76 HTTP requests and fetches 2MB of data!”
Feb 5
Google And Apple Have Caved To Pakistani Pressure To Take Down Apps Made By This Persecuted Religious Minority buzzfeednews.com · “Over the last two years, the government of Pakistan has forced Google and Apple to take down apps in the country created by developers based in other nations who are part of a repressed religious minority.”
Feb 5
Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal signal.org · “An inexpensive and tiny VPS can easily handle hundreds of concurrent users.”
Feb 4
Making Vaccine lesswrong.com · “All of the materials and equipment to make the vaccine cost us about $1000.”
Feb 4
Native Mac APIs for Go github.com · “MacDriver is a toolkit for working with Apple/Mac APIs and frameworks in Go.”
Feb 4
How to hire senior developers: Give them more autonomy hiringengineersbook.com · “The whole ordeal took months to complete, and I’m guessing that all things considered, it cost the small company of ~6 people about half a year of development time.”
Feb 4
Why I Still Use RSS atthis.link · “It was easier to get involved in serious Deep Work as I had no social feeds to endlessly scroll through.”
Feb 3
Computer Graphics from Scratch gabrielgambetta.com · “Every algorithm is built up without the use of external libraries or APIs and is presented with language agnostic pseudocode, allowing anyone with a basic understanding of programming and high school math to follow along.”
Feb 3
My product is my garden herman.bearblog.dev · “I reached basic profitability, matching an average developer salary here, about 10 months ago, and since then I’ve been improving my projects.”
Feb 3
Why Google's approach to replacing the cookie is drawing antitrust scrutiny digiday.com · “Google’s decision to kill off third-party cookies has already elicited multiple antitrust lawsuits and a U.S. congressional probe.”
Feb 3
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees aboutamazon.com · “Today, we employ 1.3 million talented, dedicated people, serve hundreds of millions of customers and businesses, and are widely recognized as one of the most successful companies in the world.”
Feb 2
Getting Better at Linux With 10 Mini-Projects carltheperson.com · “My solution was to come up with 10 subjects to learn and create an accompanying mini-project.”
Feb 2
The Documentation System documentation.divio.com · “There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four.”
Feb 2
Just because I have a vertical screen, doesn't mean I'm on a phone! shkspr.mobi · “Images are served as low resolution, for 6 inch screens and then blown up to 24 inches.”
Feb 2
VideoLAN is 20 years old today videolan.org · “Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years.”
Feb 1
Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios, Changing Business Focus kotaku.com · “Neither had released any games yet.”
Feb 1
Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes axios.com · “Developers forecast that only around 10-30% of users will actually opt-in to having their data collected, making it much harder for advertisers to target potential Apple customers without as much access to their data.”
Feb 1
My Third Year as a Solo Developer mtlynch.io · “By the end of the year, I earned $63k in revenue, far exceeding my goal.”
Feb 1

January 2021 124 posts

What went wrong with America's $44 million vaccine data system? technologyreview.com · “In May, it gave the task to consulting company Deloitte, a huge federal contractor, with a $16 million no-bid contract to manage “covid-19 vaccine distribution and administration tracking.””
Jan 31
GitHub Should Start An App Store ankshilp.com · “In any case, it doesn’t make any sense for a single entity to govern what gets installed and not on billions of devices.”
Jan 31
Why Robinhood Disabled Buys but not Sells stu2b50.dev · “As volatility increased, the DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) increased the deposit requirements for brokers.”
Jan 31
Cab Ride powersaurus.itch.io · “In Cab Ride you can drive thousands of different train routes through rolling hills, winding tunnels and weaving between the tall buildings of vast cities.”
Jan 31
Regular afternoon naps linked to improved cognitive function sciencefocus.com · “The study, published in online journal General Psychiatry, examined the sleep patterns of 2,214 healthy people aged 60 and over in several large cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai.”
Jan 30
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu · “We identify 22 third-party entities that provide shopping websites with the ability to create dark patterns on their sites.”
Jan 30
How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area codusoperandi.com · “The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
Jan 30
Offline Algorithms in Low-Frequency Trading queue.acm.org · “Indeed, the key to writing efficient software that ferrets out every last dollar is to see beyond the distracting particulars of a real-world problem and map it onto a well-known formal problem.”
Jan 30
Statement of Acting Chair Lee and Commissioners Peirce, Roisman, and Crenshaw Regarding Recent Market Volatility sec.gov · “The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities.”
Jan 29
Robinhood denies claims that it sold GameStop shares out from under its traders theverge.com · “That contradicts the stories of twelve people who spoke with The Verge, saying that the app unexpectedly sold off their holdings in some of these companies.”
Jan 29
A Look at iMessage in iOS 14 googleprojectzero.blogspot.com · “One of the major changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service which is now responsible for almost all parsing of untrusted data in iMessages (for example, NSKeyedArchiver payloads).”
Jan 29
Achieving 11M IOPS & 66 GiB/s IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation tanelpoder.com · “Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU.”
Jan 29
WE are Preparing a Class Action LAWSUIT against Robinhood! old.reddit.com · “I’m friends with a lawyer who says we have a good case for a class action lawsuit.”
Jan 28
The EU must protect the right to privacy and not attack end-to-end encryption protonmail.com · “We strongly oppose this resolution because it foreshadows an attack on encryption.”
Jan 28
Litestream: Open-source, not open-contribution github.com · “As the author of BoltDB, I found that accepting and maintaining third party patches contributed to my burn out and I eventually archived the project.”
Jan 28
Why I'm losing faith in UX creativegood.com · “I’ll call that Decade 1, from 1997 to 2007: the golden era of online UX, when companies were willing to invest in listening to customers in order to serve them better.”
Jan 28
Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life theverge.com · “These Discord servers are offshoots of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, where all of this seemingly began.”
Jan 27
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com · “To test whether science is indeed self-correcting, I tried reporting this misconduct via several mechanisms of scientific self-correction.”
Jan 27
Social media damages teenagers' mental health, report says bbc.com · “Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person’s mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.”
Jan 27
A Bootstrapped SaaS Journey to $10K MRR bannerbear.com · “The API launch definitely alienated some of these early customers and they churned.”
Jan 27
Firefox 85 Cracks Down on Supercookies blog.mozilla.org · “In short, supercookies can be used in place of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more difficult to delete and block.”
Jan 26
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML shkspr.mobi · “She’s not slicing fruit; she’s arming herself with knowledge.”
Jan 26
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus bits.ashleyblewer.com · “The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.”
Jan 26
Baron Samedit: Heap-based buffer overflow in Sudo (CVE-2021-3156) qualys.com · “We developed three different exploits for this vulnerability, and obtained full root privileges on Ubuntu 20.04 (Sudo 1.8.31), Debian 10 (Sudo 1.8.27), and Fedora 33 (Sudo 1.9.2).”
Jan 26
Incredible time-lapse shows a single cell transforming into a salamander nationalgeographic.com · “Amazingly, photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken has captured these first fleeting moments.”
Jan 25
WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update theguardian.com · “By contrast, Signal wasn’t even in the top 1,000 apps in the UK on 6 January, yet by 9 January it was the most downloaded app in the country.”
Jan 25
Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats github.com · “After a tiny unrelated description update, Just Player got suspended from the Google Play Store for “Sexual Content and Profanity policy”.”
Jan 25
The PGM-index pgm.di.unipi.it · “It is the first learned index with provably optimal time and space complexity guarantees.”
Jan 25
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry chriskiehl.com · “Designing scalable systems when you don’t need to makes you a bad engineer.”
Jan 24
Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer github.com · “Deskreen is an electron.js based application that uses WebRTC to make a live stream of your computer screen to a web browser on any device.”
Jan 24
Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion news.osu.edu · “In the national study, between 11% and 27% of healthy college athletes with no history of a recent concussion reported combinations of symptoms that met criteria for post-concussion syndrome (PCS) as defined by an international classification system.”
Jan 24
Forever Chemicals Are Widespread in U.S. Drinking Water scientificamerican.com · “Even when the researchers shifted their analysis to a higher level of 10 ppt, they still found some 18 million to 80 million Americans to be exposed.”
Jan 24
I bought 200+ Raspberry Pi Model B's and I'm going to fix them! Part 1 blog.jmdawson.co.uk · “I purchased the job lot of Pi’s for just £61 although there was a catch – they were listed as broken and I believe they are customer returns.”
Jan 23
please don't say just hello in chat nohello.net · “Note that Keith could have got his answer minutes sooner, and needn’t have kept Tim waiting.”
Jan 23
Google has turned off access to sync features for Chromium bodhi.fedoraproject.org · “There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome.”
Jan 23
Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second jvns.ca · “Initially when I read about Firecracker being released, I thought it was just a tool for cloud providers to use – I knew that AWS Fargate and https://fly.io used it, but I didn’t think that it was something that I could directly use myself.”
Jan 23
Brad Cox Obituary (1944 - 2021) legacy.com · “Dr. Cox was a computer scientist known mostly for creating the Objective – C programming language with his business partner, Tom Love, and for his work in software engineering (specifically software reuse) and software componentry.”
Jan 22
Crystal close up u-tokyo.ac.jp · “The observations confirm theoretical predictions about how salt crystals form and could inform general theories about the way in which crystal formation produces different ordered structures from an otherwise disordered chemical mixture.”
Jan 22
Press release: Facebook shuts down major left wing group in Britain swp.org.uk · “The Socialist Workers Party Facebook page – as well as account of local pages – have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given.”
Jan 22
One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected tass.com · “He underscored that air loss due to the crack are insignificant.”
Jan 22
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch aws.amazon.com · “In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Jan 21
New Intel CEO Making Waves: Rehiring Retired CPU Architects anandtech.com · “News in the last 24 hours, based on public statements, states that former Intel Senior Fellow Glenn Hinton, who lists being the lead architect of Intel’s Nehalem CPU core in his list of achievements, is coming out of retirement to re-join the company.”
Jan 21
The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let's Encrypt letsencrypt.org · “In the week before we upgraded our primary database server, its CPU usage (from /proc/stat) averaged over 90%: The new AMD EPYC CPUs sit at about 25%.”
Jan 21
Retiring Tucows Downloads tucows.com · “We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site.”
Jan 21
Beeper - All Your Chats In One App beeperhq.com · “Beeper gives you a unified inbox for 15 chat networks.”
Jan 20
I no longer trust The Great Suspender dafoster.net · “Notably the most recent version of the extension (v7.1.8) has added integrated analytics that can track all of your browsing activity across all sites.”
Jan 20
Screensaver lock by-pass via the virtual keyboard github.com · “It is possible to crash the screensaver and unlock the desktop via the virtual keyboard.”
Jan 20
Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon hacks.mozilla.org · “Secondly, Apple did not actually ship their Rosetta 2 emulator preinstalled on the Apple Silicon machines but its installation is triggered when the user tries to run an Intel application.”
Jan 20
Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing elastic.co · “Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.”
Jan 19
IPFS Support in Brave brave.com · “IPFS is an exciting technology that can help content creators distribute content without high bandwidth costs, while taking advantage of data deduplication and data replication.”
Jan 19
GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si github.com · “Specifically, at the URL, the Repository hosts and offers for download the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows).”
Jan 19
Intel Problems stratechery.com · “The only way to fix this incentive problem is to spin off Intel’s manufacturing business.”
Jan 19
Software effort estimation is mostly fake research shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com · “Why are researchers involved in software effort estimation feeding tiny datasets from the 1980s- 1990s into machine learning algorithms?”
Jan 18
HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know rachelbythebay.com · “HR is there to support the company.”
Jan 18
Context switching costs more than we give it credit for. thinkingthrough.substack.com · “But when it comes to work, especially engineering work, the cost of multitasking skyrockets.”
Jan 18
'We are sending more foster kids to prison than college' kansascity.com · “For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children.”
Jan 18
BitLocker Lockscreen bypass secret.club · “BitLocker is a modern data protection feature that is deeply integrated in the Windows kernel.”
Jan 17
The World's Oldest Story? Astronomers Say Global Myths About 'Seven Sisters' Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years singularityhub.com · “After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.”
Jan 17
The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla murilopereira.com · “VSCode was released just five years ago, and in this short amount of time it was able to capture half of the world’s software developers.”
Jan 17
The First Blue Pigment Discovered in 200 Years Is Finally Commercially Available. Here's Why It Already Has a Loyal Following news.artnet.com · “The store sells the paint for $179.40 for just 40 ML.”
Jan 17
A new and innovative way for Google to kill your SaaS startup gomox.medium.com · “Did you know that it’s possible for your site’s domains to be blacklisted by Google for no particular reason, and that this blacklist is not only enforced directly in Google Chrome, but also by several other software and hardware vendors?”
Jan 16
Big O Notation - explained as easily as possible thatcomputerscientist.com · “Big O Notation is a mathematical notation used to classify algorithms according to how their run time or space requirements grow as the input size grows.”
Jan 16
Running a fake power plant on the internet for a month grimminck.medium.com · “In particular, a PLC that acts like a value regulator in a nuclear installation.”
Jan 16
First winter ascent of K2: 10 Nepali/Sherpa climbers summit together alpinist.com · “Alan Arnette reported on his blog: All ten climbers stopped 30-feet below the summit on a relatively safe spot (still on a 40-degree snow slope at 28,200-feet) so that they could summit together in a sign of solidarity.”
Jan 16
Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living news.ycombinator.com · “Over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list.”
Jan 15
Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login news.ycombinator.com · “Interesting that they chose this route when users are getting more and more privacy-aware.”
Jan 15
Kuo: New MacBook Pro Models to Feature Flat-Edged Design, MagSafe, No Touch Bar and More Ports macrumors.com · “Kuo says the MagSafe charging connector design will be restored, though it’s not quite clear what that means as Apple has transitioned to USB-C.”
Jan 15
WhatsApp delays privacy changes after backlash p.dw.com · “Under updated terms, the app would be allowed to share users’ data, including location and phone number, with its parent company Facebook and its units such as Instagram and Messenger.”
Jan 15
null popey.com · “My use of the (probably reserved) word null seemed to fool the backend checks script, live on stage, in front of my peers.”
Jan 14
We Don't Need Data Scientists, We Need Data Engineers mihaileric.com · “There are ~70% more open data engineer than data scientist positions.”
Jan 14
Bill Gates is America's Largest Farmland Owner landreport.com · “The co-founder of Microsoft ranks as America’s largest private farmland owner.”
Jan 14
'Rent-a-person who does nothing' in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude mainichi.jp · “Shoji Morimoto has been advertising himself as a person who can “eat and drink, and give simple feedback, but do nothing more,” since June 2018, and has received over 3,000 requests.”
Jan 14
"Wireguard [sic]: great protocol, but skip the Mac app" blog post lists.zx2c4.com · “The App Store refuses to update when a network extension is running.”
Jan 13
WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source tedium.co · “Cisco was essentially compelled by the threat of legal action to release the Linux-based firmware under the GPL, but it was not thrilled to see that the device whose success finally gave it the foothold in the home that had long evaded the company being used in ways beyond what the box said.”
Jan 13
Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware's Pat Gelsinger to replace him cnbc.com · “Critics have pointed to the fact that Intel’s chief executive did not come from a technical background, having previously served as CFO.”
Jan 13
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce cnbc.com · “The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day.”
Jan 13
Pirated Academic Database Sci-Hub Is Now on the 'Uncensorable Web' nasdaq.com · “For a website that has had various domain names revoked over the years and which is now suspended from Twitter, the censorship-resistant DNS will help keep Sci-Hub accessible even as the legacy domain name system applies pressure.”
Jan 12
If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room critter.blog · “Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late.”
Jan 12
Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division's Suit to Block justice.gov · “According to the complaint, the transaction would have enabled Visa to eliminate this competitive threat to its online debit business before Plaid had a chance to succeed, thereby enhancing or maintaining its monopoly.”
Jan 12
Facebook confirms data-sharing agreements with Chinese firms bbc.com · “Huawei has never collected or stored any Facebook user data.”
Jan 12
Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time bugs.xdavidhu.me · “I have found a working IDOR (Insecure Direct Object Reference) bug, where I could get a frame from any private video on YouTube!”
Jan 11
Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the "Right to Repair" reasonstobecheerful.world · “Although often all they need is a fresh battery or receiver, “Spare parts are hard to come by, and all the components are soldered, glued or riveted,” he says.”
Jan 11
Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago news.ycombinator.com · “Thank you for everything, Aaron.”
Jan 11
Ubiquiti Networks Breach mailchi.mp · “We are not currently aware of evidence of access to any databases that host user data, but we cannot be certain that user data has not been exposed.”
Jan 11
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked) jayfax.neocities.org · “This bug has received over one hundred comments over the course of nearly two decades.”
Jan 10
What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “And the same companies who try to measure engineering productivity with metrics related to lines of code or commits wonder why their engineers are not product-focused or product-aware.”
Jan 10
PeerTube v3: it's a live, a liiiiive ! framablog.org · “The great feature of this v3 is live streaming, and we are proud to say that it works very well !”
Jan 10
Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To sherylcanter.com · “The seasoning on cast iron is formed by fat polymerization, fat polymerization is maximized with a drying oil, and flaxseed oil is the only drying oil that’s edible.”
Jan 10
Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appears effective against mutation in new coronavirus variants, study suggests cbc.ca · “The study by Pfizer and scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicated the vaccine was effective in neutralizing virus with the so-called N501Y mutation of the spike protein.”
Jan 9
Why mmap is faster than system calls sasha-f.medium.com · “Barring few exceptions, mmap is 2–6 times faster than system calls.”
Jan 9
Pesticide believed to kill bees is authorised for use in England theguardian.com · “Following lobbying from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and British Sugar, a product containing the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam was sanctioned for emergency use on sugar beet seeds this year because of the threat posed by a virus.”
Jan 9
WhatsApp rival Signal reports growing pains after Elon Musk's tweet economictimes.indiatimes.com · “Encrypted messaging app Signal said it saw a “giant spike” in India after WhatsApp announced it would be sharing more user data with parent Facebook under an updated privacy policy and new terms of service.”
Jan 9
Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over "Counterfeit" Content torrentfreak.com · “This morning, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan informed us that Twitter has suspended the site’s official account, which had over 185k followers and operated without notable issues for nine years.”
Jan 8
Apple's privacy labels reveals Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger's hunger for user data techradar.com · “The data from App Store indicates that Facebook Messenger leads in user data collection and is closely followed by Whatsapp.”
Jan 8
Best of Show - abuse of libc ioccc.org · “While its primary purpose is to serve as The One True Debugger, printf(3) also happens to be Turing complete.”
Jan 8
CO2 already emitted will warm Earth beyond climate targets, study finds cbc.ca · “A new study estimates that 2.3 C of warming is inevitable, but can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.”
Jan 8
No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees sahillavingia.com · “And it’s working: our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.”
Jan 7
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I rosenzweig.io · “This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers.”
Jan 7
Online banker Simple, once among Portland's most promising tech companies, is closing down oregonlive.com · “Simple told clients it will transfer their accounts to BBVA but set no timetable for the change.”
Jan 7
Sealed U.S. Court Records Exposed in SolarWinds Breach krebsonsecurity.com · “Under the AO’s new procedures, highly sensitive court documents filed with federal courts will be accepted for filing in paper form or via a secure electronic device, such as a thumb drive, and stored in a secure stand-alone computer system.”
Jan 7
What I've Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry bti360.com · “Assume the next person to maintain your code won’t be as smart as you.”
Jan 6
Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2 bert.org · “It’s an Atari Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop computer.”
Jan 6
How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus whyy.org · “According to Chuong, this protein actually came from an ancient retrovirus, the most famous of which is HIV.”
Jan 6
Memory access on the Apple M1 processor lemire.me · “It looks like a single core has about 28 levels of memory parallelism, and possibly more.”
Jan 6
Advancing developer freedom: GitHub is fully available in Iran github.blog · “Today we are announcing a breakthrough: we have secured a license from the US government to offer GitHub to developers in Iran.”
Jan 5
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text openai.com · “We find that DALL·E is able to draw multiple copies of an object when prompted to do so, but is unable to reliably count past three.”
Jan 5
My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero goodcheapandfast.com · “Then, Google’s May 2020 algorithm update cut my traffic by around 70%.”
Jan 5
Telegram publishes users' locations online blog.ahmed.nyc · “If someone spoofs their latitude, longitude, they can triangulate a user and find their location.”
Jan 5
Google workers announce plans to unionize theverge.com · “Prior to the announcement, about 230 Google employees and contractors had signed cards in support of the union.”
Jan 4
Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering surma.dev · “Obra Dinn is a story puzzler that I can only recommend, but what piqued my curiosity as a software engineer is that it is a 3D game (using the Unity game engine) but rendered using only 2 colors with dithering.”
Jan 4
Julian Assange: UK judge blocks extradition of Wikileaks founder to US bbc.com · “District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that while US prosecutors had met the tests for Mr Assange to be extradited for trial, the US was incapable of preventing him from attempting to take his own life.”
Jan 4
After spending over $57 million on Facebook ads, they kicked me and my pages off without warning or explanation jordan-shared.medium.com · “To date, we have not been able to find an avenue through which to talk to Facebook and hopefully find a resolution that will ensure we can continue to run our businesses while complying with all Facebook policies.”
Jan 4
ECC matters realworldtech.com · “Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC.”
Jan 3
My year in data samplesize.one · “It turns out that a typical working day (9-17) would usually only give around 5-6 hours of actual work, while the rest of time would dissolve on low-focus work, chatting to people, coffee breaks and other little distractions.”
Jan 3
URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies ylukem.com · “TinyURL’s privacy policy, last updated in 2012, has no mention of either third party data-sharing nor the cookies they share from affiliates.”
Jan 3
Philly scientist behind COVID vaccine tech was demoted by UPenn, yet she persisted billypenn.com · “When she was unable to find funding, Penn demoted her, taking her off the track to full professorship.”
Jan 3
A half-hour to learn Rust fasterthanli.me · “In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it.”
Jan 2
Shooting High-Res Thermal Photos of Iceland to Show Nature at Work petapixel.com · “Since I wanted to image wide-angle landscapes in high resolution, and my thermal camera’s field of view was only about 24 degrees, I had to put together a DIY rig to panoramically scan the scene.”
Jan 2
How to overcome Phone Addiction cognitiontoday.com · “According to a 2019 report[22], the average person spends about 3.5 hours on their phone in a day with the top 20% of people spending more than 4.5 hours a day.”
Jan 2
Did WSL2 corrupt my git repository? github.com · “It happened again, but this time with bash history got corrupted.”
Jan 2
My Experience @ Apple ex-apple-engineer.medium.com · “In this post you will read about how a team at Apple fabricated results for a project, their history of abuse, scapegoating, firing and forcing out employees, nepotism and corruption in the organization and contribution of senior management and HR to further worsening the situation.”
Jan 1
TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem omar.website · “Now you don’t need to code up a browser extension from scratch every time you want to do anything.”
Jan 1
California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement leginfo.legislature.ca.gov · “A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to take orders and deliver meals prepared by the food facility.”
Jan 1
Apple has threatened to remove Amphetamine from the App Store github.com · “On December 29th, 2020, a representative from Apple contacted and informed me that, after 6 years on the Mac App Store, Amphetamine had spontaneously began violating one of Apple’s App Store Guidelines.”
Jan 1