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Building Container Images with Nix
Dockerfiles are de facto standard for creating container images. In this article I highlight some issues with this approach and I propose building container images with Nix.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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The Dentist Office Software Story
I’ve been telling this fictional story about Dentist Office Software for years to describe why we are so focused on our “networks” investment strategy. Yesterday I told it at a HackNY event we did at the USV office and my partner Albert provided a finishing touch that really drives it home. Since I’ve never told […]
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Usenet Tradecraft: Survival in an Extremely Adversarial Environment (2013)
Survival in an Extremely Adversarial Environment If your secure communications platform isn’t being used by terrorists and pedophiles, you&# …
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Python code makes any song swing
[tweetmeme source= ‘plamere’ only_single=false] One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’s Swinger. The Swinger is a bit of python code that tak…
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How to sell your software for $20,000
I guess you can either sell $20 software to 10,000 people a year, or $20,000 software to one business a year that buys 10 seats, and either ...
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Eight years of victory
The big story this year was last month's surprise acquisition of Pinboard's long-time nemesis Delicious. This illustrates the importance of always having a backup nemesis, an area where Pinboard leads the industry.
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“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)
[This was originally published on the now-defunct Infogami and was surprisingly hard to find online, so I put it here. I’ve added commentary, with our now internet-decades of hindsight, in brackets. I’ve also summarized the names mentioned (and alluded to) along 7 dimensions: Evocativity, Brevity, Greppability…
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No, RSA Is Not Broken
I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring—and I’m not…
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Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C
Following up from the last post, there is a lot more we need to cover. This was intended to be the post where we talk exclusively about benchmarks and numbers. But, I have unfortunately been perfectly taunted and status-locked,
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Confiscating your ice cream cones
Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!! Before Ice…
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Why I am switching to promises
I'm switching my node code from callbacks to promises. The reasons aren't merely aesthetical, they're rather practical:
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Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter …
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A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI
Updated February 2, 2016: Once you learn about our team and who we are, come take a trip down memory lane with us! Yesterday morning, the Hosted UI team, responsible for VMware’s Workstation …
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Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night
Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…
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Dear Mozilla community: I screwed up. Big time.
I screwed up. Big time. Not just with Adblock Plus users but with the Mozilla community at large.
6707
Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
From now on, I won’t be building any more native apps. All my apps going forward will be progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are web…
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ICOs and VCs
The Brave browser team concluded an ICO for their Basic Attention Token yesterday in about thirty seconds. This led to this tweet: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC’s didn’t even have time to put on a sweater vest. — briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017 Of course…
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How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
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A tool for capturing captions and transcripts from online videos
I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online …
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You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
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How I Judge the Quality of Documentation
As a developer, you develop instincts for judging quality of code. One of my favorite interview questions is: When you look at a project’s code for the first time, what are the things you look for?...
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The Flying Nimbus – A high-power, self-balancing transportation contraption
What does a recycled (heavily used) go kart tire, an action-packed three-phase servo drive and a gyro/accelerometer have in common?
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Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"
There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro -monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the…
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Web-based cryptography is always snake oil
Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…
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Firefox nightly is now built with clang LTO on all platforms
You might have read that Mozilla recently switched Windows builds to clang-cl . More recently, those Windows builds have seen both PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) and LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled .
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The map is not the territory (2015)
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.