691
How Booking.com manipulates users
Many websites and applications these days are designed to trick you into doing things that their creators want. Here are some examples from timewellspent.io:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
692
Snowflake macro photography (2013)
Snowflake macro photography: how to take closeup images of real snow crystals with simple optical add-on for compact camera? In this article, you'll find detailed description of shooting and photo processing techniques, scheme of optical add-on, snowflake pictures gallery, tips and tricks, useful links. Author: Alexey…
693
Golang: Don't be afraid of makefiles
I’m using Golang for a while. During the development, I was used to repeatedly execute “go build”,“go test” manually. This was a bad habit on which I resign. It is not so painful if you use simple command without any args. But in case of more complex tasks, naturally, it is going to be a…
694
Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
695
696
Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc. However, despite the fact that all modern browsers can run ES2015+ code and natively support the features I just mentioned, most developers still transpile their code to…
697
698
699
Clocks for Software Engineers
If you have a software background and you want to pick up digital design,then one of the first things you need to learn about early on is the conceptof the c...
700
Global Mutable State
Global mutable state is one of the biggest drivers of complexity in software systems. We tackle a definition and how to reduce our reliance on it.
701
Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
702
The iPhones 8
These are solid year-over-year updates — at least as impressive as the iPhone 7 was over the iPhone 6S. If they hadn’t debuted alongside the iPhone X we’d be arguing about whether these are the most impressive new iPhone models since the iPhone 6.
703
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
704
How Useful Is Tufte for Making Maps? (2007)
Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1998, 2nd edition 2001) is a classic book, arguably his best, and certainly a key text in the field of information graphics (whi…
705
Cutting your salary by 40%
Have you ever thought to yourself, “I need to get paid far far less than I’m worth?” Me neither. And yet some companies not only pay less, they’re proud of it. Allow me to explain—
706
707
Thinkpad X62
Back in January, I used an old Thinkpad while my 12” Macbook was being repaired. I found myself really enjoying some aspects of it. This nudged me down a path that ended with me modding a frankenpad…
708
How the Bitcoins Were Stolen from Mt. Gox [video]
The thought “I know PHP! How hard could running an exchange be?” never goes anywhere good.
709
710
Why is memory reclamation so important for lock-free algorithms?
As it so happens, object lifetime tracking (or Memory Reclamation as I prefer to call it) is the current most difficult open problem in sha...
711
712
Chrome to force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS
Google bought the .dev gTLD and Chrome 63 started force-redirecting every .dev domain to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS, breaking local dev setups. Here's why, and …
713
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research Oliver 2017
714
The Minsky circle algorithm
Consider the following pseudocode: x <- 32; y <- 0; while(true){ x <- x – floor((1/8) * y); y <- y + floor((1/8) * x); plotPointAt(x, y); } x and y are always integers. This draws…
715
Don't use Git rebase
You love rebasing, right? Rewriting history might be appealing, but there are good reasons not to.
716
717
Patching is hard; so what?
It’s now been about a week since Equifax announced the record-breaking breach that affected 143 million Americans. We still don’t know enough — but a few details have begun to com…
718
“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
719
On React and WordPress
Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had sa…
720
The design side of programming language design
The word design is often used when talking about programming languages. In fact, it even made it into the name of one of the most prestigious academic programming conferences. Yet, it is almost impossible to come across a paper about programming languages that uses design methods to study its subject. In this article…