Avery Pennarun

Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensiv...

Visit apenwarr.ca → RSS feedOn Hacker News Dec 2009 – Mar 2026

Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...

An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in th...

We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...

. Not the kind of log I meant.

"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...

I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...

The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...

I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...

As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the technologies we use to work together and stay in touch. We decided...