Sex When You Have Children
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Day: 9 May 2017
What Happens When You Mix Java with a 1960 IBM Mainframe
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As an engineer for the U.S. Digital Service, Marianne Bellotti has encountered vintage mainframes that are still being used in production — sometimes even powering web apps. Last month she entertained a San Francisco audience with tales about some of them, in a talk called “7074 says Hello World,” at Joyent’s “Systems We Love” conference.
Created under the Obama administration, The U.S. Digital Service was designed as a start-up-styled consultancy to help government agencies modernize their IT operations, drawing engineering talent from Google, Facebook and other web-scale companies.
Or, as President Obama put it last March, it’s “a SWAT team — a world-class technology office.”
So it was fascinating to hear Bellotti tell stories about some of the older gear still running, and the sometimes unusual ways it was paired with more contemporary technology…
Rails is f*cking boring! I love it.
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Together with a friend I recently built Dropshare Cloud. We offer online storage for the file and screenshot sharing app Dropshare for macOS/iOS. After trying out Django for getting started (we both had some experience using Django) I decided to rewrite the codebase in Rails. My past experience developing in Rails made the process quick — and boring…
A Russian Slot Machine Hack Is Costing Casinos Big Time
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In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating…
Defeating Quantum Algorithms with Hash Functions
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In this post I’ll explain why quantum computers are useless to find hash function collisions, and how we can leverage this powerlessness to build post-quantum signature schemes. I’ll then describe a quantum computing model that you can try at home, and one where hash function collisions are easy to find…
TLS 1.3 FTW
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In common slang, FTW is an acronym “for the win” and while that’s appropriate here, I think a better expansion is “for the world.”
We’re pleased to announce that we have sponsored the development of TLS 1.3 in OpenSSL. As it is one of the most widely-used TLS libraries, it is a good investment for the overall health and security of the Internet, so that everyone is able to deploy TLS 1.3 as soon as possible…
10 Insane Trolley Problems
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A Constructive Look At TempleOS
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TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640×480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums…
How I Ruined Office Productivity With a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
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Chris works in an office full of people that like to Photoshop his face onto various things, and then post the results in the company Slack…
15 Weird Things About Ruby That You Should Know
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Ruby is an amazing language with a lot of interesting details that you may not have seen before…
Practical Color Theory for People Who Code
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seriously, the guy has a point
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I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago. Folks have been talking about the Fearless Girl statue ever since it was dropped in Manhattan’s Financial District some five weeks ago. I have occasionally added a comment or two to some of the online discussions about the statue.
…
You’re eating recursion!
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How a bullet turns into a beep
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Here’s a minor mystery:
echo •That last character is U+2022. Select that line with the mouse, right-click, and select Copy to copy it to the clipboard. Now go to a command prompt and paste it and hit Enter.
You’d expect a • to be printed, but instead you get a beep. What happened?
…
Would You Edit Your Child’s Genome?
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