A bunch of quite useful tricks. Some I already used and other's are new. Here are the headings:

1. Forward Yubikey Agent
2. Reuse connections
3. SSH straight into tmux
4. Alias commonly used hosts
5. Do not add testing stuff to ~/.ssh/known_hosts
6. Make connections last longer
7. Canonicalize hostnames
8. Yubikey and GitHub, without touching it every time

I find it quite helpful to create a persistent connection to github. It greatly reduces my connection latency for pushing and pulling.

A Preprocessor Iceberg Meme on C preprocessor magic. Similar to "The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme".

The basilisk collection (also known as the basilisk file or basilisk.txt) is a collection of over 125 million partial hash inversions of the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function. Assuming state-of-the art methods were used to compute the inversions, the entries in the collection collectively represent a proof-of-work far exceeding the computational capacity of the human race.

This is a grand work of fiction.

The author has another fiction on the concept named "Clairvoyant Computing": https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precognance.pdf

TCP slow start algorithm starts by sending a small amount of data, usually 10 TCP packets. A webpage of 14kB will fit in these 10 packets (MTU - len(headers)). Doing so can deliver the content to the users in one round-trip.

The zip format encrypts using AES based on the user's password as the key. If the user's password is too long for the AES key, then it uses the hashed password instead. After hashing, there is no way to distinguish whether or not the key is a hash. This means both the original password or the hash can be used as the correct password.

I don't think it's a security vulnerability. Also, technically, these zip files may have more valid passwords, because by fixing the output of a hash function, there may be many inputs that produces the same output, although you can only find them if you know how to reverse a hash function.

An article about a fundamental philosophical question: why is there anything, instead of nothing?

Following deep down the rabbit hole, we can see that nothingness is actually not that trivial. Something naturally arise easily from nothingness. Logic, math, conciousness all have their root from nothing and yet are no nothing. A quite inspiring read.

The article discusses how transaction is implemented in SQLite using db journals. I also learned how sqlite utilitize pages to map data in files and in memory. Good to dabble in some database internals.

An informative post about how to do Redis clustering. It includes a number of nicely-drawn illustrations.

The author made a point that reference count is almost always superior than GC in any case.

Various cyberpunk style post-processing filters for your image.

Search Reddit through pushshift.io API. Capable of searching sensored comments.

A curated (and comprehensive) list of broken things in Linux desktop from hardware, software to general usability defects.

Various atmospheric sound effect to help you focus. The site has a lot of presets to choose from and allows you to adjust individual sounds.

Tricks and misconceptions about tui apps, like how to make terminal appear a lot responsive.

Examples of productivity porn include but are not limited to: reading a tweet by a top VC about how to become a better startup founder; watching a Youtube video about the 7 mistakes you need to avoid at the gym; perusing a Hacker News thread about how to improve the code you write.

I've abstained from most social media but do still consume hackernews. A small portion of articles I read involves in productivity tips (like this one). I do not know how effective most of them are, but I don't think they're completely counterproductive. One of the most life-changing practice is time-blocking, which I also learned on hacker news. Over the years the time time-blocking afforded me is enormous.

So in my opinion, it's not always a bad thing to learn about these. Sometimes I need to know about, or at least need an affirmation on a better way to do things. And adjust myself for that, because otherwise it's no different from reading a junk novel.

Also, no need to befoul of pornography. They're a lot more useful and productive than social media!

Fun Fact: the sensation of "needing to breathe" is you sensing the acidity in your blood rise due to the increased CO2 concentration.

That’s also how the shallow water blackout happens. Because it’s the oxygen that keeps you conscious, but the CO2 that makes you breathe, and they might get out of sync. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving_blackout#Shallow_water_blackout

Oversimplified:

1. The period of x mod N, x2 mod N, x3 mod N, x4 mod N, … sequence can reveal the factors of the product of two prime numbers.
2. The period is very difficult to find for large numbers.
3. Quantum Fourier Transform enables the extraction the period in a fast way. (the only part that quantum mechanics involved and I still can't understand how)

because Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops.

In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world.

I never knew about this part of history. This probably contributed to the amount of hate M$ get from the community.

The interpretation in this article may not be true. See more discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412.

You have a ~0.0005% chance to hit the Sun. If you don't hit that your chance to hit a star at any point in the future is well below 0.000000001%, most of that coming from the first ~1000 light years. If you don't hit anything in that region the chance decreases even more.

Here's another way to see this. In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide and form a new galaxy. They predict no stars will collide with each other during the event

Note that there are billions of billions of galaxies all over the place, and each has billions of stars, and yet the chance to hit one of them is abysmally miniscule. This explains how big the space is.

You could harden a Linux server by killing the init process. That would cause a kernel panic, and prevent new processes running (e.g. shells). Existing processes like Web servers would continue to function, so you could put this at the end of the boot script :)

I never thought that is possible! Kind of stupidily funny and brilliant at the same time.