The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those…
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…
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
The most important decision-making rule you learn in business school is still largely misunderstood. When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the futu…
A glance behind the curtain: it can affect engineering decisions
Cookies like to get around. They have no scruples about where they go save for some basic constraints relating to the origin from which they were set. I mean have a think about it: If a website sets a cookie then you click a link to another page on that
Marcus Kazmierczak's blog about code, data visualization, and life
(at least on commodity desktop Linux with stock settings)
There has never been a better time to be remarkable, nor a worse time to be unremarkable.
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
I often want to start similar workspaces in tmux; for example I always want to tail those two log files in a pane , or I always want to start both vim and mysql in a pane, etc.
With some luck and a couple of XSS bugs I was able to break the new Edge
Great leaders communicate clearly and are involved
Sneak peek at future of SaaS investing — Tiny Capital and Buffer
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a ...
The largest ever single-shot monetary donation to the curl project just happened when indeed.com graciously boosted our economy with 10,000 USD. (It happened before the new year but as I was away then I haven't had the chance to blog about it until now.) curl remains a small project with no major financial backing…
Yesterday, January 2nd, my wife received a billing alert from her phone provider. Luckily, she's not with EE - because it's a pretty convincing text. That domain name is specifically designed to include the day's date. If you're stood up on a crowded train, with your phone screen cracked, would you notice that a . is…
My last post was about either The SSH protocol or The reason you need to install a karaoke captioning library if you want to change your desktop wallpaper . Find out which .
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…
Writing a book is a time consuming process, and if you’re going to dedicate a year, or more, of your life to it, it makes sense to pick the best tool for the job. If you’re technically inclined – and if you use Emacs – then the choice is obvious.
About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digg users’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’s permalink page…
When building web services, a common wisdom is to try to reduce the number of HTTP requests to improve performance.
There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…
