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Scarcity Truthers
Artificial Scarcity and the Semmelweis Reflex
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,220 posts.
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What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.
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The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)
This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.
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Modernizing AWK, a 45-year old language, by adding CSV support
Why and how I added proper CSV support to GoAWK, my POSIX-compatible AWK interpreter.
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Is there a housing shortage or not?
The housing shortage in the US is a perennially popular topic of conversation for the urbanist crowd (which online includes basically everyone.) The basic argument is that housing starts collapsed after the financial crisis and have never truly recovered.
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My experience at community college
It feels a lot of developers online either went to a prestigious computer science program in university or are self-taught. However, not many talk about community college in those communities. It’s very much a different experience, and I was in… Continue reading →
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WordPress’ market share is shrinking
There’s no more denying it: if you look at W3Techs CMS market share numbers, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, losing 0.4% market share since February. I do
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How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
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Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
As part of an omnibus bill, the Minnesota House of Representatives passed a troubling bill restricting how under-18 users engage with user-generated content (UGC) services. [At the bottom of this post, I’ve included the text as passed by the Minnesota...
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My story on “worse is better” (2018)
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
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My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
It sounds surreal to even say it out loud, but I’ve been living in America for the majority of my life, ever since I was a teenager. And for 18 of those years, I was legally a transient – hop…
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Mysterious Memset
Where did that memset come from?
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Why I left Google: work-life balance
Software engineer and writer focused on developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and the intersection of technology and human behavior.
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Why do USB-C hubs still have USB 2.0 ports? (2021)
[If USB2.0 is too boring, learn about the details of 50 different Thunderbolt-4 docks – yep you read that right, there are 50 different models – find out which ones are identical inside…
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Pages that didn't make it into “How DNS Works”
Pages that didn't make it into "How DNS Works"
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Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
Next week on Wednesday (May 11), the EU Commission will present an EU draft law on mandatory chat control to the public for the first time. Similar to Apple's highly controversial "SpyPhone" plans, the Commission wants to oblige all providers of email, chat and messaging services to search for susp
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We need a middle class for startups
Idea: Make Mittelstands cool in America. Rebrand the US Middle Market. Create a studio and fund to build and buy Mittelstands.
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Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like – not
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
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Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.
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Separate Your Billing from Entitlements
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
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If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters
Map your (least) favorite programming language to your favorite Planet Express crew member based on its characteristics.
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Hacks for Engineering Estimates
Engineers often have to ask each other for “estimates”– rough projections for how long projects will take. While some teams do rigorous estimation rituals to varying degrees of success, many situation
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I’m going to miss you, but I am taking a sabbatical
Hello, everyone. I’m going to be taking an extended break from kottke.org, starting today. I’ve been writing here for more than 24 years, nearly half my life —
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Yep, I created the new Avatar font
Fonts designed by John Roshell in sunny Southern California
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Virtual offices are not remote-friendly workplaces
The pandemic made evident how much work can, and should, be different. The forced change to accommodate remote workflows also brought to light what I like to call “virtual offices”. Unlike truly remote friendly workplaces optimized for asynchronous communication, these aim to merely transport the office into a virtual…
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Writing HTML sucks and No-code doesn't help
We can do better than writing HTML manually, but there are no developer-focused solutions.