zorked

I wish building laptops was easy.

Having only seen him in fortune files I assumed he was some sort of Usenet celebrity of the past until now.

Good,a while ago it was the contrarian, underground cult, then it was all the rage, then you were not a professional if you didn't worship it, then the cracks started to show, now it's faile…

The ANSI driver that came with MS-DOS, ANSI.SYS, also allowed keys to be rebound to small macros. So you could TYPE (cat) a file and then later press a harmless key like D and ANSI.SYS could output so…

Well, CPUs don't grow on trees. We got to the point of predictability through the same rocky, unpredictable process of eliminating randomness (a.k.a. science).

There's a difference between a claim that a country is unique for some reason (everyone has one of these) versus thinking that this makes them superior or entitled. American Exceptionalism even h…

I would recommend something that seems weird but isn't: start with Joy of Clojure just to get a sample of what the language really is about, and if you like what you see go back to one of the int…

The rule against self-incrimination is a very important part of Roman law - the government can't force you to do anything that would lead to your conviction. That's why the Brazilian police …

It's a song, and probably the tool and aphyr's blog posts will have more staying power than the song and the singer they are named after.

Why aren't they just publishing the source?

Is this going to be widely used? No. It's early technology. Will a successor of this idea change things? Yes.

Why would Panama or Egypt want to block China?

I thought for a long time that Mario was some sort of Alex Kidd rip-off.

At a company where I worked previously one team only noticed one of their systems hadn't been correctly patched against Heartbleed because there was an exploit available that they could use to te…

While the whole situation is bad, you are being hit by a case of bad customer support, not necessarily a company that does not care about security. They didn't understand your message. It's …

Isn't the Chrome sandbox a better assurance than Chrome-under-Docker? Except for the obscurity angle of course (nobody writes exploits against Chrome-under-Docker). To be fair, VMs are also mostl…

We should be glad. Eventual consistency is hard to reason about, particularly when its tradeoffs have to do with other people's systems...

What made IE6 IE6 wasn't the technical choices it made, but the fact that whatever were its views, those were forced on the world by its market dominance. The browser that is closer to that posit…

How does it work, really? Do you provide a plausible-looking virtualized fake enterprise network that will look like a real thing to outsiders? Or do you put honeypot servers alongside other productio…

It's not, and I think it's older than Node.js.

Considering there are people who have heart attacks based on whether a file ends with a newline or not, commit message formatting is a hugely important topic.

1) Ignore people's opinions 2) Parenting is not a competition against other parents 3) Literally tens of billions of people on this planet have had children. It can't be that hard. And it&#x…

I am no historian, but back in the 90s Perl was filling the niche of "the duct tape of the Internet" and systems administration language. I used it. I think three things contributed to its d…

Language popularity generally follows adoption of some key library or framework from that language. Python is probably an exception there because it got popular despite the lack of a clear reason (I w…