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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,236 posts.
I don't think Elasticsearch is a good logging system
I’ve been a heavy user of ElasticSearch for coming up 7 years now. During that time I’ve used it for a few main usecases: A Search Engine, An APM Solution (after NewRelic started being stupidly expensive), a backend for Jaeger, and as a log storage system. In all of those usecases I’ve really pushed ElasticSearch to…
Procedurally generating a rounded box mesh
If you haven't heard the story about Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson, and rounded corners, it's a fun read . A big takeaway is that rounded corners are everywhere . Let's take a look at procedurally generating a rounded box mesh.
What does my engineering manager do all day?
I officially transitioned from a lead frontend engineer to a senior engineering manager this year and wanted to provide some insight into…
DoS attacks against my online game
DDraceNetwork is an open source online game I’ve been running since 2013 with a community of volunteers. The game is available for free, I’m hosting servers for it in many countries around the world so that we have trusted official ranks . The servers are paid for by donations , which I stop collecting once the cost…
Something weird is happening on Facebook
Someone appears to be pouring enormous energy and effort into a data collection project aimed at building personality profiles from social media interaction…again
I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively open device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing…
Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks (2019)
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
We deserve better than Confluence and Notion
If you ever were in the situation of looking for a tool to manage the knowledge of your organization, chances are you ended up choosing between Notion and Confluence. A handful of other tools also exist in this field, large players like Microsoft Sharepoint or Google Drive, niche tools like …
How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
A survey of how tech projects run across the industry highlights Scrum being absent from Big Tech. Why is this, and are there takeaways others should take note of?
On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
Domain-Driven Design
A definition of DDD as a software design discipline
Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie search engine
UPDATE 2025-05-19 Somewhat un-suprisingly AWS has closed the loophole that I was exploiting for this https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#30._AWS_Lambda and as such compiling data into your lambda …
Designing Low Upkeep Software
It's common for me to get excited about a personal project, put a bunch of time into it, and then lose interest. As much as possible, I want these projects to continue working; upkeep isn't fun. What does designing for minimum maintenance look like? The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them…
Building a Theban Lattice Stool
If coming from Google: Click here to refresh this page, bringing all the related posts together. I found this ancient Egyptian stool on the British Museum’s website in early 2020 and fell in …
Found a program I wrote in 1981 and decided to bring it back to life
When you find a weird program from four decades ago and realize that it's yours.
The Perfect Voxel Engine
What is it about voxels that makes people go crazy? Throughout the past decade, there have been SO many developers obsessed with shrinking them down to have as many as possible ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ), admittedly including myself. It’s exciting both as a developer and to the gaming community to see amazing algorithms…
Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app
Telegram gives its users more freedom of speech than any other popular mobile application. Unlike other apps, Telegram can't be pressured by shareholders, cloud providers or advertisers into unjustified censorship. Telegram doesn't exist in isolation, however. It depends on other companies to function, from banks and…
Code Review from the Command Line
I do the bulk of my code reviews from the command line, especially when reviewing larger changes. I've built up a number of tools and config settings that help me dig into the nuances of the code I'm reviewing, so that I can understand it better than if I were just browsing online.
Maybe the spaghetti code conjecture is false
The Spaghetti Code Conjecture says that Busy Beaver programs ought to be, in some sense, as complicated as possible. Scott Aaronson puts it this way: