Entertainment

That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler

💥 Check out this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: When Ken Thompson won the Turing Award jointly with Dennis Ritchie for their work in UNIX, he was expected like other Turing winners to write a paper that would be published in the ACM Computer Journal. What he ended up submitting was a paper about "the cutest program [he] ever wrote"-- a sneaky undetectable self-reproducing "Trojan horse" backdoor in the C compiler that would allow him to log into affected machines as any user. Table of Contents Thompson didn't want to write about…
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Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49 million fake accounts

Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49 million fake accounts

🚀 Discover this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Key idea: European police forces have arrested seven people and dismantled a large-scale cybercrime-as-a-service operation that saw almost 50 million fake online accounts created across social media and communications platforms for fraud purposes. Seized SIM boxes in Latvia Latvian Police/Europol The coordinated takedown, codenamed Operation SIMCARTEL, took place on October 10 in Latvia, as part of a joint investigation by police in the Baltic nation, Austria, Estonia and Finland. Five Latvian nationals and two additional suspects were arrrested by police. In the raid, authorities seized 1200…
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Code like a surgeon

Code like a surgeon

✨ Check out this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Key idea: A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I’m trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn’t a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff…
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Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Cleaned With iOS 26 Update

Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Cleaned With iOS 26 Update

✨ Discover this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Here’s what you’ll learn: As iOS 26 is being rolled out, our team noticed a particular change in how the operating system handles the shutdown.log file: it effectively erases crucial evidence of Pegasus and Predator spyware infections. This development poses a serious challenge for forensic investigators and individuals seeking to determine if their devices have been compromised at a time when spyware attacks are becoming more common.The Power of the shutdown.logFor years, the shutdown.log file has been an invaluable, yet often overlooked, artifact in the detection of iOS…
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Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself)

Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself)

🔥 Check out this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: What makes an effective principal engineer or scientist? Here, I’ve distilled what I’ve observed from role models and quoted some of their advice below. While my perspective is naturally Amazon-centric, these ideas should also apply to most principal tech IC roles. As always, use your best judgment and assess if this advice applies to you and your situation. • • • 1. Different principals will have different flavors. Some dive deep in one space while others excel at horizontal influence. Some are technical…
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Harnessing America’s Heat Pump Moment

Harnessing America’s Heat Pump Moment

🚀 Discover this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Key idea: Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Joseph DeNatale, an entrepreneur and project coordinator at Jetson Home. It originally appeared in Climate Drift earlier this year, and is republished on Heat Pumped with permission. Joseph interviewed me when he was researching the piece, and I was excited to see that the final product touched many topics that I've been wanting to write about. A big thank you to Joseph and Climate Drift for sharing with the Heat Pumped community - it's incredibly in-depth. Since there’s…
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What Is Intelligence?

What Is Intelligence?

🔥 Discover this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Key idea: What intelligence really is, and how AI’s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis.In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to…
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John Carmack’s 3/18 .plan

🔥 Check out this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: John Carmack's 3/18 .plan John Carmack's .plan March 18, 1997 I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail. Nothing is set in stone yet, but it is still looking like a dll is going to be the primary interface. I have been seriously considering a java interface, but the tradeoffs (time…
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TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software

TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software

🚀 Read this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I., a convenient series of visual metaphors that allows us to interact more easily with our machines. The most basic computing interface is the command-line prompt, the empty box in which users write instructions in code directly to the machine; the Xerox Star replaced that forbidding vacuum with a friendly illustration of a tabletop surface, textured…
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New OSM file format: 30% smaller than PBF, 5x faster to import – General talk

New OSM file format: 30% smaller than PBF, 5x faster to import – General talk

💥 Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 💡 Key idea: The OSM dataset is huge, and keeps growing every day. Great news, of course, but sometimes the sheer volume can be overwhelming – there are just gobs and gobs of data! Hence, we created GOB (“Geo-Object Bundle”), a new file format that makes tackling OSM data faster and easier. It’s a companion format to our now-familiar Geo-Object Library (essentially, a tightly-compressed GOL with its indexes stripped). To support this new format, GOL Tool 2.1 has two new commands: save GOLs as GOBs and load GOBs into…
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