The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
"Software libraries suck. Here's why, in a sentence: they promise to be abstractions, but they end up becoming services. An abstraction frees you from thinking about its internals every time you use it. A service allows you to never learn its internals. A service is not an abstraction. It isn't 'abstracting' away the…
Analyze how the 52% public market correction impacts startup funding rounds, with data showing divergent effects on Series A vs. Series D valuations in 2022.
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
American Airlines has been clamping down on websites that work with AAdvantage member data for their customers. They made Award Wallet stop tracking member accounts and they sent a cease and desist letter to Red Ventures, which owns The Points Guy, over its TPG app which - among other things - lets customers track…
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
Most Emacs advice you'll find on the internet is largely good, and will improve your Emacs abilities, but people do occasionally share outright bad advice that harms your learning.
Dissolve MSG in water to form a saturated solution. Wait for small MSG crystals to form. Then, tie it to a string to let it grow bigger.
Trying to categorize exuberance
Some friends of mine play the board game Settlers Of Catan . In this game, each player rolls two ordinary dice on their turn, and the number which comes up determines what resources people get for the turn. When a seven is rolled, something special happens: no resources are generated, and instead a robber moves on the…
If you’re here, you probably got redirected from LetMyPeopleCode.com. This is not a scam. LetMyPeopleCode.com was my blog while I was employed in Developer Relations. Now that I’m pursuing other dreams, I’ve decided to brand on my own name, not on clever handles. That means shutting down LetMyPeopleCode.com. Rather…
Starting a greenfield project with microservices is easy. The promises are wonderful but often they are far from reality. This time I’ll share my experience on the truth about microservices when starting a project from scratch.
All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—with consumption of new music actually shrinking. How did we get here, and is there a way back?
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of…
If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me , an online identity verification service that…
People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.
Designing from cradle to grave is no longer good enough. We need to postpone that grave as long as possible. This is how to design for a right to repair.
Response to Scientific American's "The Complicated Legacy..."
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
It appears that Intel’s partnership with TSMC is much larger than it first seemed; the implications for Intel as whole are massive.
The other day I was reading about the development of personal computers and the desktop GUI, and I was thinking about how comfortable we all have become with the analogy of the “desktop” for our personal computers. We place files in folders and keep them on our desktops. There’s a lot of physical action going on…
You start on an enclosed lawn, surrounded by four walls with a doorway in one of them. If you go in and explore, you might begin to feel trapped. You'll find you can visit five different rooms in the house, or go back outside to the lawn, but there's no way to go anywhere else. It's not because there are walls…
I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, working on technology from within.
PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.
The systemd-analyze security command gives your systemd service units an automated security rating. This is a good starting point for security hardening.
The first time I heard about Flat Earthers, I thought the idea was a joke. Surely nobody would believe something so crazy. I didn’t think about it again for a while. Until I started seeing celebrities, including famous basketball players, claiming the world is flat The rise of this phenomenon puzzled and concerned me…
Winner, 2020 Best Information Science Book Award Winner, 2020 Sally Hacker Prize Winner, 2021 Computer History Museum Prize
