Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 506 posts.
Mobile OSes and their most successful apps have drained browser choice of meaning for more than a decade. This has lead to confusion for users and loss of control over data. Web developers, meanwhile, face higher costs and reduced ability to escape walled gardens. It's time for the charade to end.
Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The mo…
On my team at Coinbase, we ask everyone to use the React performance trinity – memo, useMemo, and useCallback – all the time. For some reason, this is controversial. I’m guessing this has something to do with Twitter. This article explains why we do it anyway.
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
Confusing corners of the unix utilities
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an emoji email address service. In the process I went viral on Tik Tok, made $1000 in a week, hired a Japanese voice actor, and learnt about the weird world of emoji domains.
I started a business that lets you build websites using pen and paper. In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.
While it’s possible to understand Apple’s motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving…
Every element I use for the basic structure of a HTML document, with explanations why.
After trying for 3 years, I found a way to grow transparent, high quality sodium chloride crystals at home. Here's my procedure.
Electric cars are fantastic compared to ICE vehicles, but E-Bikes are even better. Much lower environmental impact and far more suited to medium range travel such as commuting. Here in NL they sell in huge numbers, far faster than electric cars. But they also have their limitations: a regular e-bike tops out at 25…
“Under His Eye,” she says. The right farewell. “Under His Eye,” I reply, and she gives a little nod.
Peeling back the curtain of running a viral meme website for 5 days. More details than you could ever hope for.
The greatest danger to national security has become the companies claiming to protect it
Apple just announced that they will use “perceptual hashing” to detect illegal photos on iPhones. I have some experience to share on this technology.
"I work on ads at Google" "Can I ask why? I honestly can't understand how anyone could." Someone recently asked me why I work on ads, and I wanted to write up something more thorough than my comment. (Despite being a work topic this is a personal post and I'm speaking only for myself.) One answer is that I'm earning…
ssh-keygen can sign and verify signatures, and it's way better than PGP
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
You are brought into a startup to run their three-person data team. This is a story about teams and organization, and how you spend a year getting the team to a good place.
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to…
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft's chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. This was back in the "Information Superhighway" days, when Al Gore was holding hearings on the demilitarization…
I tend to use a lot of retro software, partly because I’m a big nerd but also because I just prefer to work in a terminal. There were a ton of major commercial software products for MS-DOS that were highly polished, and can still be used effectively in an xterm today.
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense...
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
