The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,743 posts.
Another week has passed, and another 3 million people in the US have filed for unemployment. While the current situation hasn’t impacted programming jobs quite as much, it’s just a matter of time before the economic damage hits most everywhere. There will be layoffs, and plenty of them, and occasionally whole…
How to cope even when work is hard.
With only 3 ingredients you can make a tasty gel within minutes. The gel is very fragile and easily “looses” liquid, in this case whey, which is seen as a clear drop under the spoon. This loss of liquid from a gel is known as syneresis.
I wrapped up my job search recently, and I’m happy to say that I’ll be joining a YC-backed startup called “Heap.” I thought I’d share a little bit about my job search in case the information may benefit other job-seeking devs. I’ll go over the pipeline of places I applied to and the result of each application. I’ll…
This post is not about that story. This post is about a comment made by one of the readers in the forum where I saw it.
After anki trashed my history, uploaded the trashed history to the sync server, and then repeatedly re-synced the trashed history every time I tried to restore from backup, I wrote my own spaced repetition app. It reads input from a markdown file, asks questions in the terminal and stores state in a json file. I wrote…
The coronavirus has pretty much turned the aviation industry upside down and taken it on its wildest ride ever. No one could have ever predicted a pandemic of this proportion to have this kind of f…
I have been writing articles on this website for twelve years. If you were to look at the early versions , you would think it is a fresh-out-of-school project with icons drawn in Microsoft Paint. And that is exactly what it was. The site started in a world before smartphones and tablets at a time where Apple products…
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
I was tricked into thinking I had tons of grit as a student. I worked hard in school. I put in long hours. I stayed up all night reading and preparing for debate topics, doing homework, writing essays. It was easy for me to burn the midnight oil. I enjoy
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
In March, I made my DevOps books free to help anyone who wanted to learn new skills during the global pandemic lockdown. In April, Device42 generously extended that offer for another month. I originally had the idea to give the books away on a whim on a Sunday night, thinking I'd give up a fair chunk of revenue, but…
I’ve been blogging for close to four years now. I started blogging because I wanted to pick up a new skill (writing) and challenge myself to do something new. Because I blog about what is both my work and hobby - software development and more specifically, cloud/platform engineering - it’s relatively simple to come up…
In remote work, we communicate primarily through writing. We send messages in Slack. We document projects in Notion. We send meeting invites with a written description of the purpose. We’re writing all the time. Many organizations are working from home at the moment. Thus, writing is even
What happens when you forget your password or loose your phone? What Google wants to know to validate your identity?
Upon re-reading Mathematical Apocrypha , a collection of tales dealing with great mathematicians as well as their quirks and foibles, I thought about my own interactions with some of The Elders of Mathematics (from here on abbreviated as THEM) and what I would add to such a book. While I have a few interesting and…
Ennui (pronounced on-wee ) is chronic boredom that involves weariness, apathy, dissatisfaction, and lack of fulfillment. Some people experience a general sense of ennui in life, whereas others experience it in a specific domain, like their hobbies or work. For example, someone might experience ennui when it comes to a…
I have frequently wanted to use the external link symbol ( ) in text that I’m writing, without having to resort to including an image. Normally the solution there would be to find the graphical symbol in Unicode and figure out how to type it.
I was molested and raped as a child. I spent my teens and twenties filled with anger. My therapist once said something like "How did I know ...
I wrote a bit about my reasoning to De-Google here . Now I want to write a bit about my progress, the struggles and what I ended up with.
UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. Here are the first five bits: Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even … Continue reading →
You may have heard that today’s phone fraudsters like to use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn’t know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transactions on your account — data that…
Starting about ten years ago, I started hearing about agencies and agency people getting involved in what they were calling product design....
Using design principles to embody your priorities.
