Technical

A collection of 41 posts

Technical

Là où EDF accélère le temps (RGN)

Parmi la grande diversité des activités de R&D d’EDF Lab les Renardières, les problématiques de vieillissement des matériaux et de corrosion sont regardées de près afin de toujours garder une longueur d’avance. Niché entre la Seine et la forêt de Fontainebleau, le site d’EDF Lab

Technical

Des soudures plus rapides pour l'industrie

Assembler et souder des pièces de métal est une étape nécessaire dans la réalisation de nombreux projets industriels. Or, c'est une opération connue pour être très délicate, si bien par exemple que l'EPR de Flamanville connaît retards et dépassements de budgets en raison de non conformités

Technical

How to have more apps run on your LineageOS phone

People usually say they either have an iPhone or a "Samsung". For the latter situation, they actually mean they have an Android phone, but the brand of the (giant) hardware manufacturer has apparently become stronger than that of the OS. The lines are blurry though, as manufacturers customize

Technical

Measuring the energy impact of hybrid peer-to-peer / CDN video delivery: initial takeaways (Lumen)

In this work, former colleagues have assembled the last pieces of a project on which I have contributed before leaving the company. Topic is video delivery, the biggest chunk of internet traffic in the last years, and how we can optimize the energy consumption of its delivery. Classical way to

Technical

LavaRand: network security with lava lamps (Cloudflare)

As some of you may know, there's a wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office that we use for cryptography. In this post, we’re going to explore how that works in technical detail. (…) LavaRand is a system that provides an additional entropy

Technical

Mechanical Watch (Bartosz Ciechanowski)

Beautiful page that explains step by step how a mechanical watch works. Interactive animations help understand and are a pleasure to the eye! A fellow HN user [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533] noticed that the code running the WebGL animations is human readable and is available at https:

Technical

Quand le code informatique prend la forme d'un poème

Les développeurs aventureux connaissent pour certains le brainfuck [https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck], langage de programmation ésotérique volontairement illisible, dont le "Hello World" s'écrit de la façon suivante: > ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<

Technical

Profiling media workloads in Firefox (Mozilla)

It will come as no surprise that playing video and audio in a web browser requires a certain attention to performance. Whether it is by getting the design right, using good implementations of codecs (potentially with hardware acceleration), taking care of using memory properly and avoiding unnecessary copies, or ultimately

Technical

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (Avery Pennarun)

(…) The IETF people, when they were thinking about IPv6, saw this mess getting made - and maybe predicted some of the additional mess that would happen, though I doubt they could have predicted SDN and wifi repeater modes - and they said, hey wait a minute, stop right there. We

Technical

Your Computer Isn't Yours (Jeffrey Paul)

It’s here. It happened. Did you notice? I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997 [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html]. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about [https://craphound.com/pc/download/]. On modern versions of macOS, you simply

Technical

Super Mario Bros 3 speedrun in ~3 minutes

Video explaining how a series of glitches in Super Mario Bros 3 are exploited to warp to the end of the game, without crashing it. This feat is possible by an in-depth knowledge of the game at the assembly level and a rock-solid execution. Assembly instructions are coded by moving

Technical

How NAT traversal works (Tailscale)

Very well written article by Tailscale that covers the detail of connectivity between hosts behind firewalls and NATs. After reading this, you will be able to, in networking terms, punch holes, place hairpins and build the foundations of peer to peer applications. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/ PS: you may

Technical

Libtorrent adds support for the WebTorrent protocol (Feross)

(…) The engine that powers many of the most popular torrent clients including qBittorrent, Deluge, and many more – has added support for the WebTorrent protocol. WebTorrent support in libtorrent opens the door for many more torrent clients to connect to browser peers. Browser peers (which must use WebRTC) will now be

Technical

Noise cancelling device halves noise pollution through open windows (NTU)

Sometimes there's nothing like a nice breeze from an open window, but in the city that can come with an unwanted side order of street noise. Inspired by the kind of noise-canceling tech used in headphones, researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) have developed a window-based system

Technical

A Statistical Analysis of Coughing Patterns on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ (Liam Shaw)

This is (…) about using statistics to understand a process of exponential growth linked to coughing. No, not coronavirus. I’m talking about Charles Ingram’s infamous 2001 appearance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? where he (allegedly) cheated his way to win £1 million with the help of his

Technical

Code Review Best Practices (Palantir)

(…) This blog post presents Palantir’s take on code reviews. We perform code reviews (CRs) in order to improve code quality and benefit from positive effects on team and company culture. For example: * Committers are motivated by the notion of a set of reviewers who will look over the change

Technical

Adopting and Developing Business Source License Software (MariaDB)

Business Source License (BSL) was created (…) to provide a mutually beneficial balance between the user benefits of true Open Source software that is free of cost and provides open access to all of the product code for modification, distribution, etc., and the sustainability needs of software developers to continue delivering

Technical

On Privacy versus Freedom (Matthew Hodgson, Matrix)

(…) All of this completely ignores one critical thing - the value of freedom. Freedom to select which server to use. Freedom to run your own server (perhaps invisibly in your app, in a P2P world). Freedom to pick which country your server runs in. Freedom to select how much metadata

Technical

Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction (OpenAI)

We’ve observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek. Through training in our new simulated hide-and-seek environment, agents build a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported. The self-supervised emergent complexity in

Technical

Life of a binary (Kishu Agarwal)

Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too.

Technical

Fixing the Internet for Real Time Applications (Riot Games, 2015)

League of Legends is not a game of seconds, but of milliseconds. In day-to-day life, two seconds fly by unnoticed—you took two seconds reading that! In-game, however, a two-second stun can feel like an absolute eternity. In any single match of LoL, thousands of decisions made in milliseconds dictate

Technical

Design concepts for Formula 1

Formula 1 cars are fast. That is taken as read. But exactly how fast they are is perhaps not something people dwell on too often. (...) The manipulation of air around a car is the single biggest performance differentiator in F1 - and collectively the teams employ hundreds of people and

Technical

Why can’t a bot tick the "I'm not a robot" box? (Quora)

How complicated can one little checkbox be? I mean it’s just OH MY GOD YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE. For starters, Google invented an entire virtual machine – essentially a simulated computer inside a computer – just to run that checkbox. That virtual machine uses their own language, which they encrypt

Technical

Why Proof of Stake (PoS), an alternative to the energy-wasting Proof of Work (PoW), is not currently able to secure blockchain cryptocurrencies.

A topic not emphasized enough with PoS protocols is their lack of resilience in dealing with worst-case scenarios. (...) Thinking about worst case scenarios is an absolute must when dealing with critical systems, and even more important when these systems are on the global scale. (...) So how resilient is a PoW

Technical

How Open-Source licenses apply to NPM dependencies and Full-Stack JavaScript development (2017)

Before I was not concerned about license of npm package. I could check the license of immediate dependency but never checking 3rd party (transitional) dependencies. And then I met guys from legal department. I now believe that developers should have a basic understanding of software licensing to have a constructive