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Bullshit Jobs
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work …
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
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Bye bye BetterSlack
I wrote BetterSlack and Slack asked me to take it down. Find the story here.
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What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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A Missing Link in Postgres 11: Fast Column Creation with Defaults
How a seemingly minor enhancement in Postgres 11 fills one of the system’s biggest operational holes.
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Building a Treasury Bond Ladder
A US treasury bond ladder is a great alternative to a high-yield savings account or CDs to invest short-term funds that you don't want to put at risk. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds (treasuries) are US government debt securities that may pay interest and return the principal at a specific time. While not FDIC…
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Cracking Litter Box DRM
TLDR : My robot cat litter box bricks itself after a set number of washes with each soap cartridge so I reverse engineered and suppressed the verfication process to enable refilling.
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Why Static Websites Need HTTPS
It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] and as I said at the
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Service Workers
When authoring JavaScript for the browser, you don't think twice about embedding that JavaScript within an HTML document. Perhaps you load your script via a resource request, or embed it directly within a script tag, but in either scenario the lifecycle of your JavaScript is irrevocably married to its parent document.
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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?
Few days ago I’ve received email where I was asked for an advice from a web developer who was considering switching from Ruby to something else. I was asked ...
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A Road to Common Lisp
I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.
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A little bit of the one-time MacOS version still lingers in ZFS
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Oops, I Wrote a C++ Compiler
TL;DR I wrote a .NET library that can compile C/C++ code into a byte code that it can also interpret. It is used in my app iCircuit to simulate Arduinos. You can use it yourself with the nuget package CLanguage.
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Solve Less General Problems
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
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The Real Deal About rel="me"
Earlier today , Barry Schwartz published a piece over on Search Engine Roundtable called Google Does Not Use rel=me Microformats . The article got shared around Twitter a lot, and those tweets surfaced on the microformats IRC channel . In it he mentions a few things that I would like to respond to, that is probably…
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Programming War Stories: Connectix
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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Why Love Generative Art?
Over the last 50 years, our world has turned digital at breakneck speed. No art form has captured this transitional time period - our time period - better than generative art. Generative art takes full advantage of everything that computing has to offer, producing elegant and compelling artworks tha
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Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
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The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server
NTP on a Raspberry-Pi - documents configuring a Raspberry Pi for headless operation, configuring NTP for remote monitoring, adding a GPS/PSS device (two discussed), and how well NTP performs in WAN-only, LAN, and PPS configurations.
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Pseudo-bandlimited pixel art filtering in 3D: A mathematical derivation
Recently, I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler, and I’m very disappointed with the poor texture filtering seen in this game. It is PS1-level, with severe shimmering artifacts, which ruins the nice pixel art. Tastefully merging retro pixel art with 3D environment is a very cool aesthetic to me, so I want it to look…
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Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)
Cause a series of sequential operations to appear instantaneous or simultaneous.
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The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
Privacy, Power, & Protection In The Cyber Century2018148 points108 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.