The Deadlock Empire

#308 – March 24, 2019

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The Deadlock Empire

The skills you need are your intelligence, cunning, perseverance and the will to test yourself against the intricacies of multi-threaded programming in the divine language of C#. Each challenge below is a computer program of two or more threads. You take the role of the Scheduler - and a cunning one! Your objective is to exploit flaws in the programs to make them crash or otherwise malfunction.

How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

A while back I an­swered a ques­tion on Quora: Can peo­ple ac­tu­al­ly keep up with note-​taking in Math­e­mat­ics lec­tures with LaTeX. There, I ex­plained my work­flow of tak­ing lec­ture notes in LaTeX using Vim and how I draw fig­ures in Inkscape. How­ev­er, a lot has changed since then and I’d like to write a few blog posts ex­plain­ing my work­flow.

"Don't deploy on Friday" and 3 other "unwritten rules" of software engineering

Everything old is one day new again, and there comes a time when even seasoned programmers encounter ancient wisdom in day to day code-slinging. It is impossible to enumerate the “unwritten rules" of any discipline, partly because many of these rules tend not even to be rules. Instead, "unwritten rules" often seem to be a discipline’s way of paraphrasing an abstract and timeless truth, rather than a specific insight unique to the art of scrapbooking (for example). That technical stuff is easy to write down.

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.

Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money

We all know the story: you can’t make money on open source. Is it really true? I’m thinking about this now because Mozilla would like to diversify its revenue in the next few years, and one constraint we have is that everything we do is open source.

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