571
A deep history of Halloween
Or, how far back can historical analysis take us?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
572
How to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friends
It all begins with one scary email late at night just before I had to go to sleep:
573
Insiders Stealing Instagram Usernames?
My computer on the net
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How I write code using Cursor
A personal review of Cursor, an LLM-powered coding tool.
576
Swift – A great language strangled by governance?
A great language strangled by governance
577
What's New in POSIX 2024
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
578
Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
579
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
580
HTML Form Validation is underused
HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.
581
Why so few Matt Levines?
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
582
Improving Xwayland window resizing
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example
583
So long WordPress
This has been a hard post for me to write after participating in WordPress since before I even started a career in tech and, until 3 months ago, for my entire tech career. That said, it has been in the making for quite a while now and it is time that I make it official. I’ve officially left the WordPress project after…
584
Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
585
They want your ethics for $105
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
586
The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gave an interesting talk at NDSS 2024 titled "AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s".
587
Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic
The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental…
588
Hacking the T2S+ Out of Fear: Get Lock-In Thermography for Free
Hacking the T2S+ v2 to work on computers, tear it down for the first time online, and play with lock-in thermography as a bonus!
589
The motor turns too much
This instalment is about the "Bench Kona" I've built in the shed. Behold its questionable integrity:
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On Good Software Engineers
I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.
591
The unnecessary decline of U.S. numerical weather prediction
This blog provides updated forecasts and comments on current weather or other topics
592
There is no such thing as a global method in Ruby
What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced
593
Platform Strategy and Its Discontents
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
594
A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
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School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)
Learning is a consequence of doing
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Crossing the USA by Train
Today, I get to start a train trip I've always wanted to do: Going from New York to San Francisco!!
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Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially since our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft. This is the English version of this Dutch piece. In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s…
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Moonshine, the new state of the art for speech to text
Can you imagine using a keyboard where it took a key press two seconds to show up on screen? That’s the typical latency for most voice interfaces, so it’s no wonder they’ve failed…