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A decade of writing at Mozilla
Today—April 3, 2016—marks the tenth anniversary of the day I started working at Mozilla as a writer on the Mozilla Developer Center project (now, of course, the Mozilla Developer Network or MDN). T…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
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AWS Lambda: a few years of advancement and we are back to stored procedures
Serverless computing is the new buzzword. AWS describes Lambda (their implementation of Serverless) as the way how you’ll do things post containers. Go figure …
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I Tried to Virtually Stalk Mark Zuckerberg
In late 2015, I finished reading Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and was very inspired to try to automate something in my life. At the same time, I have been always fascinated by Mark Zuckerberg…
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You can now install a GSM network using apt-get
This is great news: You can now install a GSM network using apt-get! Thanks to the efforts of Debian developer Ruben Undheim, there's now an OpenBSC (with all its flavors like OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoS
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Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014)
One of the protests against allowing more housing construction is that supply and demand has failed – that developers only want to build luxury units or that the global elite will invariably buy al…
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Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% from Panama Leak
Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive…
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SSE: mind the gap
SSE and SSE2 are available in every single x86-family CPU with 64-bit support. You too can play around with SIMD, which is great fun! Unfortunately, SSE2 level in particular also happens to be what…
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The TSA Randomizer App Cost $336k
You may have seen the TSA Randomizer on your last flight. A TSA agent holds an iPad. The agent taps the iPad, a large arrow points right or left, and you follow it into a given lane.
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Rust via its Core Values
I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…
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Accounting in 2016 – Still a manual and tedious process
The past few weeks I’ve been struggling with automating my accounting, invoicing and banking processes to the point I don’t really have to think about it anymore. Currently, a lot of my accounting-related processes are still way too manual for my liking. Being both a virtuous, lazy programmer and an entrepreneur I’d…
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Years and lessons working at ThoughtWorks
I’ve been at ThoughtWorks for 12 years. Who would have imagined? Instead of writing about my reflections on the past year, I thought I would do something different and post twelve key learnings and observations looking back over my career. I have chosen twelve, not because there are only twelve, but because it fits…
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US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source Code Policy (Update: the draft is not online anymore, link changed to final version). The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the ge...
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The Tools of a Blind Programmer
The Life of a Completely Blind Programmer in the Netherlands
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How Safe Browsing Works in Firefox
Firefox has had support for Google's Safe Browsing since 2005 when it started as a stand-alone Firefox extension . At first it was only available in the USA, but it was opened up to the rest of the world in 2006 and moved to the Google Toolbar . It then got integrated directly into Firefox 2.0 before the public launch…
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Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management
I first started managing people seven years ago, three years after I graduated and got my first design job. At the time, I was woefully…
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Go 1.7 toolchain improvements
This is a progress report on the Go toolchain improvements during the 1.7 development cycle. All measurements were taken using a Thinkpad x220, Core i5-2520M, running Ubuntu 14.04 linux.
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Solving the cash problems from self-funding rapid growth
“If you grow too fast it can kill the business.” After spending years fighting for even a tiny bit of growth, ConvertKit was now facing a totally different kind of problem: more growth than we could support. In October, November, and December we were averaging growing 40% per month. Recurring revenue went from $25,000…
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Facebook is ruining Instagram
I always loved Instagram. It's been my favorite social network since I had a smartphone. I was happy when it was purchased from Facebook…
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Side Projects
Back when we started USV in 2003/2004, we used to see a lot of side projects that had taken off and were turning into companies. We funded at least one such side project, Delicious, which ended up getting sold to Yahoo! a few years later. But I remember that we would see one or two […]
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Hotpatching a C Function on x86
In this post I’m going to do a silly, but interesting, exercise that should never be done in any program that actually matters. I’m going write a program that changes one of its function definitions while it’s actively running and using that function. Unlike last time , this won’t involve shared libraries, but it will…
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Music Language Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks
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Let's Encrypt and Nginx – State of the art secure web deployment
An overview of a secure web deployment with Let's Encrypt and Nginx. How to set up a valid HTTPS connection, harden it and get top security ratings.
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LeftPad and Go: can tooling help?
You’ve probably heard that story about NPM community and LeftPad package, that broke thousands JavaScript projects worldwide. There was a nice follow-up article titled “Have We Forget How To Program” and one guy even created left-pad.io - Left-Pad As A Service web service. People got a lot of fun discussing this story.
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More Chinese Mobile UI Trends
Another look through mobile UI design patterns in the Middle Kingdom.
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The Basics of Web Application Security
Security is both very important and often under-emphasized. While many targeted techniques help, there are some basic clean code habits which every developer can and should be doing
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Why I don’t use CSS preprocessors
I don’t use CSS preprocessors they way many people do. Here’s an attempt to explain why.
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Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...