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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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I'm Testifying to Congress about Data Breaches – What Should I Say?
Edit: I'm putting this up front as a lot of people are asking for it - the hearing will be live-streamed on YouTube and there's already an embedded video on the hearing page [https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/identity-verification-post-breach-world/] . There's a title I
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GTD in 15 Minutes – A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done
GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework created by David Allen for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting things happen, which often turns out not to be…
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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Of SVG, Minification and Gzip
Smaller files are downloaded faster, so making an asset file size smaller before sending it to a client is a good thing to do.
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Cost Effectiveness of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
The Problem The WHO estimates that depression and anxiety together account for 75,000,000 DALYs annually, making up ~5% of total DALYs. In “Measuring the Impact of Mental Illness on Quality of Life…
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The Cost Center Trap
In the 1960’s, IT was largely an in-house back-office function focused on process automation and cost reduction. Today, IT plays a significa...
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DéjàVu: a map of code duplicates on GitHub
DéjàVu: A map of code duplicates on GitHub Lopes et al., OOPSLA ‘17 ‘DéjàVu’ drew me in with its attention grabbing abstract: This paper analyzes a corpus of 4.5 million non-fork projects hosted on…
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What's wrong with the default build tool for Scala
SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…
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“Security problems are primarily just bugs”
People are debating this email from Linus Torvalds (maintainer of the Linux kernel). It has strong language, like: Some security people ...
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Vision Insurance Is Making Glasses More Expensive
A geeky optician lending his expertise and interests to everyone who wears eyewear.
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Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
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Switching Jobs
When people move to different jobs, here’s where they go.
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Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft
Amazon.com is hugely dominant in cloud computing and behaving like Microsoft did in the 1990s
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Switching from 1Password to Bitwarden
I've been using an OpenBSD laptop as my workstation a lot more lately, probably because most of my hardware just works now and I don't have to think too much about it. The touchpad works when I touch it, I can be confident that when I close the lid, the laptop will fully suspend and then fully resume again when I open…
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When I use classes, when I don’t, what I do instead and why
When I use classes, when I don't, what I do instead, and why
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Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple (2012)
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
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Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout
I have heard rumblings that Apple was considering making a bigger push for macOS users to upgrade to High Sierra. At the time, I was very unsure what that meant. Forcing updates for patch releases, such as 10.13.0 to 10.13.1 is one thing; moving users from Sierra to High Sierra with little input is another thing…
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A Founder Salary Calculator
[July 21, 2023] There’s a newer version of this post , including an updated calculator . Founder salaries are not a topic I’ve had to spend ...
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The Atoms of Programming
In the world of physics, there are many different models that can be used, though typically each of them has different applicability to different contexts. At the small scale, quantum physics is a very useful model, Newtonian physics will yield evidently incorrect predictions so is less valuable. Where a Newtonian…
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Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit
The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.
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Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas and Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
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Baking Bread with the Romans: Part II – Panis Quadratus
Taste the daily life of Romans with this recipe for Panis Quadratus: The infamous sectioned bread excavated at Pompeii and preserved for millenia after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
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A Cookbook for Machine Learning: Vol 1
This was a busy week, I had no time to read anything new, so I'm sharing a note that I wrote for myself, for no other reason than to understand things better. It's a kind of cookbook of various "transformations" you can apply to...