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The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 466 posts.
122
The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
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LinkedIn dark patterns, or why your friends keep spamming you to sign up for it
or: Why Your Friends Keep Spamming You to Sign Up for LinkedIn
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In Defense of Inclusionism
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
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Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
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Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer (2014)
One of the best things about modern cryptography is the beautiful terminology. You could start any number of punk bands (or Tumblrs) named after cryptography terms like ‘hard-core predicate&#…
127
Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
128
Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
129
Cryptographic Agility
( These are notes that I wrote up from a talk that I gave at the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience . You can tell that it was in Washington, DC because of the “cyber”.
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Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up (2008)
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
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Technical Issues of Separation in Lisp Function Cells and Value Cells (1988)
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
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OpenTimestamps: Scalable, Trust-Minimized, Distributed Timestamping with Bitcoin
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
133
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
134
NIST is No Longer Recommending Two-Factor Authentication Using SMS
NIST is no longer recommending two-factor authentication systems that use SMS, because of their many insecurities. In the latest draft of its Digital Authentication Guideline, there’s the line: [Out of band verification] using SMS is deprecated, and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance.
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Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
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GC support in Rust: API design
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
137
Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
138
The Relativistic Rocket
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
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Removing the PowerShell curl alias?
PowerShell is a spiced up command line shell made by Microsoft. According to some people, it is a really useful and good shell alternative. Already a long time ago, we got bug reports from confused users who couldn't use curl from their PowerShell prompts and it didn't take long until we figured out that Microsoft ……
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The IQ Halo effect
On desirable correlates of intelligence
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The MIT License, Line by Line
171 words every programmer should understand
144
Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…
145
Elm is Wrong
A few weeks ago, on a whim my friend and I decided to hackathon our way through an app to help us learn how to play guitar . In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to learn something new, and do the project in the Elm programming language , about which I had heard many good things.
146
The Memory Models That Underlie Programming Languages
There are about six major conceptualizations of memory, which I’m calling “memory models”, that dominate today’s programming.
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Confessions of a Necromancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Some thoughts on asynchronous Python API design in a post-async/await world
I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio . These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some…
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Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
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Learn Raw React – No JSX, No Flux, No ES6, No Webpack
Learn React from the ground up, without worrying about JSX, Flux, ES6, Webpack, etc.