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Stop Being the Hero
Why best products and leaders are not heroes; they solve 3 layers of every problem
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,223 posts.
18752
Life at 800 MHz
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
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18754
Big Time Public License
a FRAND-ly license for software
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Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering
Distinguishing the trees from the forest in software engineering and how not to conduct interviews.
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Cost of Attrition
How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?
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Engine cooling – why rocket engines don’t melt
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
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5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
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Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
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Dealing with APIs, JSON and databases in org-mode
A practical Org-mode workflow for calling APIs, working with JSON responses, and querying the resulting data with databases and executable blocks.
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18764
Send text messages for free using Python
Using SMS and MMS gateways we can send text messages to phones from a computer via email. With this strategy we can use a combination of the Python SMTP and email library to send text messages programmatically for free! This not only includes short text messages, but also multimedia messages with pictures, videos, or…
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Catching Native Apps
If you imagine a world where the sum of all things you can do with a computer is exactly matched, and locked down for all time with what you can do inside a browser, then the arguments for the web are persuasive. Why write for a specific platform when you can write for all platforms at once and gain the other…
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Losing our product to button syndrome
Fighting a pandemic in the world of software
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My process for building a feature
I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to one of …
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Great AA Alkaline Battery Test (2016)
Regular readers would probably know that I have a love of batteries, and their associated test equipment. Maybe it was the fact that they were expensive, but pervasive, and my enjoyment as a child …
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Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2020 and 2021?
I have done a few previous blog posts on who has contributed to PostgreSQL , but I did not do one last year. A couple people mentioned to me...
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Why don't I have a blog?
I feel like I should have a blog. Specifically, a tech blog. Everything points towards it! I like coding, I like reading, I particularly like reading blog posts . So then, why don't I have one?!
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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
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Amish Hackers (2009)
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →
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Writing a Game Boy Emulator in OCaml
For the past few months, I have been working on a project called CAMLBOY, a Game Boy emulator that runs in the browser.
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Rust in 2022
In previous years, the core team have asked the community to write new years blog posts about Rust in the coming year. They haven't this year, but I wanted to write one anyway. However, it turned out to be harder than expected. Perhaps that's due to Rust being in an
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From TypeScript to ReScript
Rewriting the Inhyped.com React frontend in ReScript brought a sound type system and easy JS interop, at the cost of a small community.
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Teaching how to code is broken
Typically: * Chapter 1: Types * Chapter 2: Variables * Chapter 3: Operators/Math * Chapter 4: Control structures * Chapter 5: Arrays * Chapter 6: Functions * Chapter 7: Structs * Chapter 8: Classes and Objects * Chapter 9: Methods * Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism * Chapter 11: Some advanced thing X * Chapter…
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The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing. The newest version of Wi-Fi layers on the ability to sense people or objects by using math…
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Problem solving strategies in a graduate real analysis course (2010)
This is going to be a somewhat experimental post. In class, I mentioned that when solving the type of homework problems encountered in a graduate real analysis course, there are really only about a…