Chris’ Corner: Better CSS Animation

CSS animation rules. Just have a look at… CodePen lol. There was a (long) time when it didn’t exist, though. My old buddy Jonathan Snook wrote in 2007 that he didn’t like the idea of animation coming to CSS at all, but had changed his mind by 2009. They’ve evolved

Behind the scenes with OverflowAI Search

Go behind the scenes with how we designed our new search.

React JS Coding Interview Challenges and Exercises

Mersenne primes are unsafe

In the previous post I mentioned that a particular Mersenne prime would be unsuitable for cryptography. In fact, all Mersenne primes are unsuitable for cryptography. A prime number p is called “safe” if p = 2q + 1 where q is also a prime. Safe primes are called safe because

Victorian public key cryptography

Electronic computers were invented before public key cryptography. Would public key cryptography have been possible before computers? The security of RSA encryption depends on the ratio of the difficulty of factoring relative to the difficulty of multiplication. This ratio was high, maybe higher, before modern computers. Suppose the idea of

Navigating a LaTeX file

I like generating long LaTeX documents from org-mode because, for one thing, org-mode has nice section folding. But not everyone I work with uses Emacs, so its better to work in LaTeX directly rather than have Emacs generate LaTeX. AUCTeX has section folding for LaTeX documents, though so far I’ve

HTML entity data

It’s surprisingly hard to find a complete list of HTML entities in the form of a data file. There are numerous sites that give lists, often incomplete, in a page formatted to be human-readable but not machine-readable. Here’s an XML file from the W3C. Here’s a two-column text file I

Double-struck capital letters

I’ve needed to use double-struck capital letters lately, also called blackboard bold. There are a few quirks in how they are represented in Unicode and in HTML entities, so I’m leaving some notes for myself here and for anyone else who might need to look this up. Unicode The double-struck

Primes, weeds, and military precision

Here’s a quote from Don Zagier that I found in Larry Rolen’s lecture notes on modular forms. There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that, despite

Don’t let your intrinsic motivation become a liability

An inner drive to excel is compatible with expecting a pay rise.Chris T. from Riot Games shared a post on LinkedIn titled “Why most fail the final interview at Riot Games.”The answer: Most candidates don’t have the “clear intrinsic motivation” Riot seeks.The concept of intrinsic motivation was pioneered by Edward Deci and later