2 April 2024

33 links · Tuesday

How does hyperthreading work.

Introduction In the last few months, there were 2 occurrences where people were talking about the implementation of hyperthreading; the In...

Note taking system should be simple

No note-taking app is perfect. Apps like Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, and Logseq each have their own advantages but can be complex and packed with unnecessary features. Finding the ideal app is impossible, and transferring data between apps is challenging due t…

Committing research fraud is easy. Let’s make it harder.

originally published by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “How to Stop Academic Fraudsters” (I didn’t choose that title) “Hi Alex, this is not credible.” I’ll never forget that…

I'm doing this because this is what I got. • Ninjas and Robots

I was talking with a friend recently who’s feeling stuck at work. Middle-aged, everything seems hard. Struggling to find the next opportunity and dissatisfied with the current one. They’re unsure how to escape this rut. I listened to a podcast... | Ninjas and …

You Are All On The Hobbyists Maintainers’ Turf Now

For quite some time, I have felt some unease at the public discourse around OpenSource. In the past few years, we have seen a growing discourse around the sustainability and security of the large body of OpenSource software.

Here is why Emacs uses the Meta key

Remember my article on why vi uses hjkl keys? It got very popular so I thought I'd also do an article about Emacs. When Stallman and Steele created Emacs, they both worked at MIT's AI lab. The systems they worked on had these funny keyboards with a bunch of ex…

On Transitioning to Product Management - Daniel D. McKinnon

For the last few years, every few weeks I’ve gotten connected with someone interested in transitioning to PM. While these reach-outs come from a huge range of different backgrounds (engineering, program management, science, sales, design, marketing, etc.), >50…

Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses

Every piece of software I write I license under the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) unless I have forked it from something else. The GPLv3 is the premiere copyleft license, meaning that it not only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own vers…

Timeline of the xz open source attack

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, careful…

Unraveling the Power of Property-Based Testing in Unveiling our Own Biases

With this article I would like to address an often-overlooked aspect of our craft: our inherent biases in test case identification and, consequently, in the production code we craft. As Alberto Brandolini aptly put it: "It is not the domain experts' knowle…