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Tradition is Smarter (2018)
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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Train Travel in the UK: A Foreigner’s Perspective
Although British people love to complain about the state of their railways, my impressions about train travel in the UK were mostly positive.
993
Analysis of Apple Watch running data
Analysis of Apple running measurements and statistics
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Self-control secrets of the Puritan masters
People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy.
995
Not Mysticizing System Dynamics
A system dynamics model, properly considered, is just an analogy dressed up in a bit of formalism.
996
GitHub Actions Pitfalls
During one of my assignments, I worked with GitHub Actions pretty much every day. I implemented workflows, created new actions, and helped people migrate their projects from jenkins to actions. As much as I like actions – and I like them a lot – there are some things that caught me off guard. I have collected some of…
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The MIPS ThinkPad, Kind Of
Pop quiz: what classic brand of laptop is this? I'll give you another hint. Bright-red TrackPoint and mouse button trim, classic keybo...
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When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
So when did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
1000
What does $0=$2 in awk do?
The trick to understanding awk in all its terse glory is to understand its defaults. Most solutions you see in the wild are a clever symphony of awk defaults stacked on top of each other. In this post, I break down one of the most popular one-liners which should hopefully make future awk-ing pretty straight forward.
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iPhones and action discoverability
Discoverability I spend a lot of my time thinking about UX and design, and I try to consciously think about it in the wild when I can. One of the things that always catches my eyes is the idea of discoverability, or how a user is able to discover that action X does some thing Y. A basic way to do so is to rely on…
1002
Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
Which is good! Boring = success
1003
Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete
A rather unstructured look at one of the older and infuriatingly trivial internet protocols: WHOIS
1004
Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six
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1005
Aging programmer
Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. To celebrate that this turned out to be completely false, here are some assorted reflections as a 40-year-old programmer that looks back: • Compared to my…
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Get in zoomer, we're saving React
Looking back, and forward
1008
Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect
Two years ago, I started out building a new software product. From the start, it would require mobile, web, and backend components to make it work, so I had to make quite a few technology choices. Here is how those turned out.
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A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements
A mysterious voice is moaning and grunting on American Airlines' in-flight announcement systems, and nobody knows who or how they're doing it.
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Software I’m thankful for (2021)
Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today. Endless poorly documented sockopts, unexpected changes in write semantics across FSs and OSes, good luck trying to figure out mtimes . But despite the mess, I can generally wrap my head around open/read/write/close. I can strace a binary and figure…
1012
Be critical or be corrupted
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
1013
Ezno: a new TypeScript compiler
Introducing Ezno and the current state of the project.
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Using GPT-3 to pathfind in random graphs
I wondered how GPT-3 might do on the following problem: given a partially-connected graph, find a path between two nodes, or determine that no path exists. I wrote some code to automate generating …
1015
The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web
Last week my mother died. After we put her urn into the ground next to my father’s we went back to their flat to talk about next steps and dividing up their belongings amongst us three children. One thing I immediately called dibs on were my father’s two books.
1016
The South Asian Polycrisis
In deciphering the global polycrisis it can be helpful to break down the interplay of crisis dynamics into regional systems.
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Passkeys
This is an opinionated, “quick-start” guide to using passkeys as a web developer. It’s hopefully broadly applicable, but one size will never fit all authentication needs and this guide ignores everything that’s optional. So take it as a worked example, but not as gospel.
1019
We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
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Rust 2024 the Year of Everywhere?
I’ve been thinking about what “Rust 2024” will look like lately. I don’t really mean the edition itself — but more like, what will Rust feel like after we’ve finished up the next few years of work? I think the answer is that Rust 2024 is going to be the year of “everywhere”. Let me explain what I mean. Up until now…