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Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea
Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t e…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 415 posts.
272
A Hacker’s Guide to Git
A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub. Introduction Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s a...
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Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
(Background: Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same day ingredient delivery service. Select a recipe on our website, and we deliver everything you need…
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My Amazon S3 Mistake
DevFactor | Page are used for templating and causing DevFactor to be easily navigable
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Farewell GitHub, Hello Immersive Computing
Today is my last day at GitHub. Recent events have given me a lot of time to reflect on what’s important to me, and I’ve decided to switch gears and focus on building something from scratch again. Since visiting the Oculus VR team at their office three months ago, I’ve come to believe that immersive computing (aka…
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Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)
As chief executive officer of Microsoft, William H. (Bill) Gates is considered one of the driving forces behind today’s personal computing and office automation industry. Gates started his ca…
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Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
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Reading the Silk Road configuration
Many of us believe it wasn't the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believ...
280
How I made the print and eBook versions of my web book
It’s a funny feeling to spend nearly six years making something and then finally hold it in your hand. It’s simultaneously, “This is it! ” and “Is this it?” How can it be so small when it feels like such a big piece of my life?
281
Who smeared Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
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Burn Baby Burn
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
284
The Worst API Ever Made?
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
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IPv6 privacy addresses crashed the MIT CSAIL network
A few hours ago, I sent the following “dear colleagues” email (lightly edited to remove some private details) to all my users at work: This has been a very trying week. For those of you…
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History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned
Apache Storm recently became a top-level project , marking a huge milestone for the project and fo...
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Low-level is easy
My previous entry has the amazingly interesting title "Blogging is hard". Gee, what a wuss, says the occasional passer-by. Gotta fix my image, fast. Think, think, think! OK, here's what I'm going to tell you: low-level programming is easy. Compared to higher-level programming, that is. I'm serious.
291
How misaligning data can increase performance 12x by reducing cache misses
Here's the graph of a toy benchmark 1 of page-aligned vs. mis-aligned accesses; it shows a ratio of performance between the two at different working set sizes. If this benchmark seems contrived, it actually comes from a real world example of the disastrous performance implications of using nice power of 2 alignment…
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The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, …
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Bored people quit (2011)
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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Bash bug: the other two RCEs, or how we chipped away at the original fix
The patch that implements a prefix-based way to mitigate vulnerabilities in bash function exports has been out since last week and has been...
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Full Stack Startups
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
299
Crash Course on Notation in Programming Language Theory
This blog post is meant to help my friends get started in reading my other blog posts, that is, this post is a crash course on the notation ...
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Android betrays tethering data
Software engineer, Free, Open Source Software Consultant, Innovator, Fedora & Debian Developer