10561
The CAP theorem. The Bad, the Bad, & the Ugly
The CAP theorem is too simplistic and too widely misunderstood to be of much use for characterizing systems.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
10562
Leadership is a hell of a drug
Last week, I received the following invitation to a compulsory on-site meeting, following management's repeated engagements with some sort of Agile shaman.
10563
Signs you're about to be acquired (2020)
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
10564
The art and history of lettering comics
Todd Klein's online book exploring little-known aspects of comics: lettering, letterers, logo design and more.
10565
The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
10566
The end of Airplane.dev
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
10567
Autogenerating a Book Series from Three Years of iMessages
Tired of waiting for iMessage to load my messages from years ago, I printed them all out in a set of paperback books.
10568
How to Structure C Projects: These Best Practices Worked for Me
I recently worked on two different C projects, and I wanted to structure them in a way that would make them easy to maintain and understand. I also wanted to make sure that the projects were easy to build and test. In this post, I will share my experience and the best practices I found for structuring C projects.
10569
10570
A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down
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…
10571
Leaving LinkedIn
What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…
10572
BlackCat ransomware group implodes after apparent payment by Change Healthcare
There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ ALPHV “) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However…
10573
A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.
10574
Training LLMs from ground zero as a startup
Chronicles of training strong LLMs from scratch in the wild
10575
Cracking Meta's Messenger Certificate Pinning on macOS
Bypassing certificate pinning in Meta’s Messenger application on macOS.
10576
Array languages vs. the curse of the spreadsheet
It has been said that the most popular programming language in the world is the spreadsheet (and in particular these days, Excel). There...
10577
This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
A Celebration of Donald E Knuth
10578
The "missing" graph datatype already exists. It was invented in the '70s
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type ( HN ) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first.
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10580
Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
10581
10582
The Future That Never Was
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
10583
My talk on CSS runtime performance
A few months ago, I gave a talk on CSS performance at performance.now in Amsterdam. The recording is available online: (You can also read the slides.) This is…
10584
Borrow checking without lifetimes
This blog post explores an alternative formulation of Rust’s type system that eschews lifetimes in favor of places . The TL;DR is that instead of having 'a represent a lifetime in the code, it can represent a set of loans , like shared(a.b.c) or mut(x) . If this sounds familiar, it should, it’s the basis for polonius…
10585
The hunt for the missing data type
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
10586
Do literally anything
Feeling overwhelmed? Don't know where to start? Do literally anything.
10587
The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
10588
Singapore Airlines Concorde
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
10589
French court issues damages award for violation of GPL
On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…
10590
Bring back private offices
Open Office Sucks