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Important Coding Habits
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
1652
Why even let users set their own passwords?
Today we seem to be living through a war on passwords. This is manifested in various ways; in its most passive form, it takes the form of people blogging about how passwords are bad. The more material changes are the general trend towards no longer treating passwords as a sufficient condition for access in favour of…
1653
Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
Talk transcript on various patterns that slowly influence how teams deal with reliability, and highlight some of the key interactions and behaviors I keep finding work well in the organizations I've been part of.
1654
Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
1655
AWS networking concepts in a diagram
Before March 2023 I couldn’t for the life of me understand what was going on in the AWS VPC dashboard. I mean, look at the length of the scrolling bar on the left-hand panel! So, with the goa…
1656
What we talk about when we talk about system design
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet…
1657
Internet search tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
1658
Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API
I've been operating Pushover 's public-facing API for over a decade now and I thought I'd pass on some advice for those creating a new API.
1659
Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors
I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…
1660
Book Review: The Laws of Trading
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
1661
Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
A group of prominent scientists spread misinformation about COVID's origins. Mainstream journalists missed the story.
1662
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
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Rethinking Infrastructure as Code from Scratch
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code. This is problem space that many talented people are tackling.
1665
Small joys of programming in Odin
Update (2023-07-21): I was being a bit overly brief with liberal use of ... to mean “unimportant” in the code examples. Ginger Bill (creator of Odin) noted it might be clearer to have more correct/explicit Odin and Zig code for the examples given people would be less familiar. Those has been updated For the past few…
1666
I have written a JVM in Rust
I have built a toy Java Virtual Machine in Rust, complete with garbage collection, exception handling, and the ability to run real Java bytecode using OpenJDK's rt.jar.
1667
Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common
I was wondering: how often do nanosecond timestamps collide on modern systems? The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time. As a result, I think it is unsafe to assume that a raw nanosecond timestamp is a unique identifier.
1668
Sub-pixel distance transform
High quality font rendering for WebGPU
1669
An invitation to a secret society
Or: why you should be a lizard
1670
A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
The original specimen of the Dutch Fell Types, their digitisation by Igino Marini, and further enhancements by Lin Yangchen as a font for thesis typesetting in LaTeX.
1671
Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it
We often romanticize the notion of programming, presenting it as an abstract form of art, a science, or even a form of magic. The truth, however, is much mor...
1672
Become Ungoogleable
I've removed my website from indexing by Google . The proximate cause is Google's new effort to DRM the web ( archive ) but there is of course so much more.
1673
Accidentally Load Bearing
Sometimes people will talk about Chesterton's Fence, the idea that if you want to change something—removing an apparently useless fence—you should first determine why it was set up that way: The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly…
1674
Spoil your secret sauce
Go on an adventure. Find a New Thing™. Bring it back. Share it, and demonstrate why the New Thing™ is worth sharing.
1675
The past is not true
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1676
A framework to securely use LLMs in companies – Part 1: Overview of Risks
Part 1 of a multi-part series on using LLMs securely within your organisation. This post provides a framework to categorize risks based on different use cases and deployment type.
1677
Cold restart whole system after total outage
"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.
1678
Beyond introvert vs. extrovert
This 100-year-old binary classification of human interaction holds us back. It's time to move past it.
1679
A glitch in the SEO matrix
Or: A comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management
1680
Comic Code: Monospaced interpretation of the most over-hated typeface
Name: Comic Code, Comic Code Ligatures Type: Retail typeface Publisher: Tabular Type Foundry Release year: 2019 Purchase links: I Love Typography (both)