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

What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...

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...

I guess I know something about train wrecks. One night when I was 10 years old, me and my mom were driving home. We came to a train crossin...

. Not the kind of log I meant.

A bit over 3 years ago, after working for many years at a series of startups (most of which I co-founded), I disappeared through a Certain V...

[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...

I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...

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...