61
No More Fear
Here’s the country I want to be a citizen of: the one that decides to buy comfort and convenience by deploying courage.
Tim Bray
- Popular posts
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Visit tbray.org → On Hacker News Apr 2008 – May 2026
Tech Industry & Business 38Society, Policy & Culture 29Software Engineering 23Life, Learning & Writing 15Web & Frontend 14Career & Management 14
62
Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days
At 6:30 PM on Wednesday August 4 th my 15-year-old daughter and I pulled up the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in front of my 91-year-old Mom’s place in Regina, Saskatchewan. I was tired and achey because I’d just finished driving 1,725km (1,072 miles) across two days to see her for the first time since Covid started. I…
63
Ingress
It’s a new thing on the Internet, a planetary-scale augmented-reality game being played on a real planet: ours. It’s fun to play, particularly if you have kids. And interesting, I think, for anyone who cares about issues of Life Online, even non-gamers.
64
The I-JSON Message Format
The Olde ASCII is at rfc7493.txt . I’ll put a nicely-formatted HTML version here as soon as I pull a few pieces together. This is really, really simple stuff and should be about as controversy-free as an RFC can be.
65
Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…
66
Meta.ai Oh My
“Meet Your New Assistant” says the announcement , going on with “Built With Llama 3”. And oh my goodness has it ever got a lot of coverage. So I thought I might as well try it.
67
Where Yegge’s Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first…
68
Where’s the Apple M2?
DPReview just published Apple still hasn't made a truly “Pro” M1 Mac – so what’s the holdup? Following on the good performance and awesome power efficiency of the Apple M1 , there’s a hungry background rumble in Mac-land along the lines of “Since the M1 is an entry-level chip, the next CPU is gonna blow everyone’s…
69
Specifying JSON
I find myself tasked with polishing and publishing a little custom JSON-encoded language. It’s harder than it ought to be.
70
Lock-In and Multi-Cloud
Alone in a room with the customer’s CTO, I said “So, I spent this morning talking to your people, and it looks like you’re using low-level generic tech for everything and managing it yourself. You could save a shit-ton of money by using high-level managed services and get load-scaling for free.” “Yeah,” he said, “but…
71
Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules
I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.
72
Bits on the Wire
Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for “media” (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for “objects” (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This…
73
Why host and write a blog?
Jon Udell is blogging less . Gosh, so am I . There are loads of ways to talk to the world, new alternatives every day it seems. Is this thing, you know, over?
74
Doing It Wrong
Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It’s time to stop the madness.
75
Bump
One of the nice things about this job is that I’m meeting lots of interesting startups who are doing mobile apps. My fave so far is Bump .
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Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window
We expect streams of text to scroll down in our browsers. But almost all of them scroll incorrectly.
77
Vision 1993
I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in…
78
The Cloud and Open Source
This is eventually about the public cloud and Open Source, but — apologies in advance — takes an indirect and long-ish path.
79
Steve at NeXT
Late in 1989 I opened my email one morning and there was one from sjobs@next.com saying “come see us.” So I went and spent the day and failed to make a sale, but so did Mr. Jobs.
80
Now A No-Evil Zone
As of this morning I work for Google. The title is “Developer Advocate”. The focus is Android. Fun is expected.
81
An Android Side Project
I want to be able to write apps for my phone in in something other than the Java language; for example Ruby or Python. This isn’t one of the things my group at Google has asked me to look at, but I think it’s worth doing and worth some of my time. I’m writing this today because I’m amused by the contrast with the…
82
After Mac?
So, there are new MacBooks and many people are unhappy . Tl;dr: Apple thinks thin-and-light is more important than well-equipped-and-powerful.
83
Desperate Perl Hacker
I owe a whole lot to Perl. So does the practice of computing in general, and the construction of the Web in particular. Perl’s situation is not terribly happy; I wouldn’t go so far as to say “desperate”, but certainly these are not its glory days.
84
Life at Google
As I noted in the previous outing , I have the peculiar fortune of working for a company that’s also a tourist attraction; so I’ll do some tour-guiding while my eyes remain fresh.
85
Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
Possibly you’ve never heard of it. But if you know anyone who knits or crochets, ask him or (more likely) her about Ravelry and chances are you’re talking to an active member. It’s big. This is an interview with Casey Forbes , who constitutes the whole engineering staff.
86
Ten Theses on Tablets
As of now, I’ve been carrying the Samsung Galaxy Tab for a month, using it every day; this has included two major road trips . I suppose there are a few other humans who’ve had this much hands-on with a 7" form-factor tablet, but I don’t know of any others with a blog and a free hand to write what they think.
87
A Story of O(racle)
In recent days I’ve been thinking of JavaOne, as we kicked it around and decided we just couldn’t send speakers ; and of Oracle OpenWorld , to which JavaOne will now serve as an appendage. It reminded me of a conversation I had last year about Oracle.
88
Tail Call Amputation
This is perhaps a slight digression; just an extended expression of pleasure about Clojure’s recur statement. It neatly squashes a bee I’ve had in my bonnet for some years now; if it’s wrong to loathe “tail recursion optimization” then I don’t want to be right.
89
If Your Job’s Just a Job
Well then, you’ll probably really love The 4-Hour Workweek , a 2007 book by Timothy Ferriss . On the other hand, if you love your job and wish you could do more of it, there’s not much here for you but a few handy email-management hints.
90
Ongoing · Concur.next — Hard-Core Clojure
Here’s real news: Alex Osborne of National Library of Australia , also known as @atosborne , whom I first met on #clojure , took the Wide Finder bit between his teeth and has posted a remarkable implementation story: Widefinder 2 with Clojure . Um, 8m4.663s! If you care about any aspect of this stuff you really ought…