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Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
It’s well established that estimating software projects is hard. This is true, but you should learn how anyway.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,240 posts.
20732
Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design (2020)
View this page on my new site This review is largely in response to the article "It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code", and the ensuing Redd...
20733
Data notation in Clojure
Homoiconicity (code as a data structure) is one of the pillars of the Clojure language. It gives the extensibility and flexibility to the language.
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Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice
Would you like to know a secret?
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Stepping Back from Speaking
a short post
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I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)
In defense of one of the most important JavaScript libraries ever
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Learn by reading code: Python standard library design decisions explained
On your Python learning journey, you may have heard that a great way to get better is to read code written by other people. That's true, but finding good code to study is not easy, mostly because the design philosophy and the reasoning behind the code are rarely documented. The Python standard library is special in…
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The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
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Maps Of Matter
Status: Rough working notes – me thinking aloud. Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring much detailed specialist background.
20742
Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS
The internet nowadays is ephemeral. Layers upon layers of trusted 3rd parties are necessary to distribute content online. It requires ongoing maintenance and is susceptible to censorship or hostile takedowns. In this blog post, I describe the steps I took to host my blog in a trustless, permanent, and…
20743
Shorting Bitcoin
I just bought put options on MicroStrategy ($MSTR) , Coinbase ($COIN) , and Purpose Bitcoin ETF ($BTCC-B.TO) , all at a strike price not far off the current (late June) price, expiring around Christmas. Here’s the thinking.
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Incremental note-taking
I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our…
20746
We moderns are status-drunk
Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs.
20747
The 'Fuck You' Pattern
In the software industry, there is a term for intentional designs which coerce the user into doing something, be it consciously or subconsciously - a ‘dark pattern’. These patterns are employed by social media networks, e-commerce, video games, and many more places. I’m coining a new term called the ‘Fuck You’ pattern…
20748
“The Martian” + Starship
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta…
20749
The Lightness of Windows
The Windows 11 announcement was fun and interesting, but there is a reason that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft’s business.
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Economics of Innovation: Detailed Reading List (2019)
If this is your domain name you must renew it immediately before it is deleted and permanently removed from your account. To renew this domain name visit NameBright.com
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Data-oriented design or why you might shoot yourself in the foot with OOP (2009)
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
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Problems with math rendering on the web (2020)
Since I first started working on my website at age fourteen, the site has gone through many revisions, and hopefully changed for the better. This blog was originally dynamically served using a Python/Flask backend, having a custom login system and post “editor” (just an input box). One of the more strange things about…
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Tips for Better Signup / Login UX
Mobile patterns · Form field validation · Autofocus · Microcopy · Error messages · Error prevention
20757
Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash
The latest announcements for Windows 11 have revealed that the next version of the Windows operating system will have very stringent hardware requirements. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite reasonable. For example, they’re finally dropping support for 32 bit X86 and legacy BIOS boot. These make sense, because…
20758
Typed Programs Don't Leak Data
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
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Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
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