Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
I was quoted in BuzzFeed: “My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does…
Typometer is a tool to measure and analyze visual latency of text / code editors.
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
We are in 2020 and the US president is about to ban TikTok, a video-sharing social network mobile app, because “it poses a risk to US…
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
(Written in July 1999 for www.linuxworld.com ; permanently installed now in Web Tools Review )
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
A few years ago I wrote [_The World in Which IPv6 was a Good Design_](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810). I'm still proud of that article, bu...
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant…
First, to dispense with the philosophical argument: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I'm free to use — or waste — it however I please; but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if this is how my time could be best spent. That applies doubly if the question is not merely about the choices I made but is rather…
Saagar Jha's website.
On this week's Under the Radar, Marco and Dave eloquenty discussed Apple's piss-poor documentation.
Normally when I write about something on here I take the time to fully think-out a point, make a case, address all the major sides of the issue that I can think of, etc.
The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.
Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken…
Notice. Since this seems to be such a common question I think I should describe my background. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and I was once a tenured academic (professor). I now work in the biotech sector. I have published a number of peer reviewed papers in virology. If you really want to know more about me…
Yesterday a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a new bill called the EARN IT act. On its face, the bill seems like a bit of inside baseball having to do with legal liability for informati…
What is the complete path between visiting thepiratebay and sublimating an mp3 file from thin air? In this post, we'll implement enough of the BitTorrent protocol to download Debian. Look at the [Source code](https://github.com/veggiedefender/torrent-client/) or skip to the [last…
A s*** font that f***ing censors swearing automatically
Overview of search tools for desktop and mobile; using Emacs and Ripgrep as desktop search engine
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
