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Buy things, not experiences
There’s a phrase going around that you should “buy experiences, not things.” People, it’s claimed, think that having a lot of stuff is w...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,153 posts.
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I got pwned by my cloud costs
I have been, and still remain, a massive proponent of "the cloud". I built Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) as a cloud-first service that took advantage of modern cloud paradigms such as Azure Table Storage to massively drive down costs at crazy levels of performance I
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Const all the things?
Last week someone posted a /r/cpp thread titled “Declaring all variables local to a function as const”: Ok, so I’m an old-school C++ programmer using the language now since the early ’90s. I’m a fan of const-correctness for function and member declarations, parameters, and the like. Where, I believe, it actually…
5734
I accidentally used YAML.parse instead of JSON.parse and it worked
How I stumbled upon the fact that YAML is a superset of JSON.
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Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
Hey all, I’ve been enjoying wordle, the puzzle game recently but also wondered how a program might do at it.
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Abuse and Harassment on the Blockchain
In the frenzy to attract venture capital funding and draw new users and investors into blockchain technologies, 'how will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?' is going unasked. While blockchain proponents speak about a 'future of the web' based around public ledgers, anonymity, and immutability, those…
5737
Staff Engineer Communities
There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing.
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Strict Python function parameters
What do you think about when writing a new function in Python? The function name, parameter names, optional/required parameters, and default arguments are all on the list. Here is a simple Python f...
5739
In defense of complicated programming languages
A polemic critique of 'simple' programming languages and a defense of complicated ones.
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Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
A dive into Seoul Metro's Line 9
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The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
Why and how the UK Coronavirus Dashboard team built their analytics service on top of PostgreSQL & Citus on Azure.
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The Future of E-Bikes
The best feeling on a bike is cruising down a hill, barely pedaling, and taking in the surroundings. E-bikes are like that all the time. "How do you know if someone has an e-bike? They'll tell you!" goes the joke.
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Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)
I've always been curious about the story of Bell Labs – how it was formed, why it was successful, its challenges and struggles, innovation engine, people, its organizational structure, operations, and its legacy. The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is an excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary of what, how, and
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Device wraps around hot surfaces, turns wasted heat to electricity
Penn State scientists have created flexible thermoelectric devices that can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces, converting wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible.
5749
The control group is out of control (2014)
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
5750
Ethnographic research on Dynamicland
The “Dynamic Medium Group” led by Bret Victor which is developing “Dynamicland” is much admired and closely watched in the interaction design community. Yet the information about their work is closely-guarded and usually only available in a highly moderated form. The work of ethnographer Götz Bachmann, who spent much…
5751
Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years
Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years, and for the first time in the U.S. we have simultaneous bubbles across all major asset classes.
5752
Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
5753
Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world
I’m not a POWER (or recently: Power) expert, only an enthusiastic user and advocate. Still, in the past couple of weeks a number of people from around the world asked my opinion how the POWER architecture could be kept relevant. This blog is really just an opinion, as I do not have the financial means to go ahead. It…
5754
Click and Swap, our alternative to Drag and Drop
At Contentsquare, we gather hundreds of metrics about user interactions on the websites of our customers. Having all this information can easily become cumbersome and hard to exploit. To make user…
5755
MoonBounce: The dark side of UEFI firmware
At the end of 2021, we inspected UEFI firmware that was tampered with to embed a malicious code we dub MoonBounce. In this report we describe how the MoonBounce implant works and how it is connected to APT41.
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I'm making a Typescript type-checker in Rust
TLDR; I'm making a Typescript type-checker in Rust. Right now it supports a smaller subset of the type-system and exists as a fun side-project, but the end goal is a compilation tool we can use to make Typescript compilation go brrrr...
5759
On Leaving Facebook
After 8.5 years at Facebook I joined a small startup called Replit. Leaving wasn't easy, and during the process I've talked to half a dozen friends who were ...
5760
Off the Grid
People choose to live off-grid for self-sufficiency, resilience, or ecological reasons. For us, to live off-grid, is mostly letting go of the numbing culture of convenience and surrounding ourselves with systems we trust for long transits across the ocean. When far away from the coasts, we have to rely on our vessel…