The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,153 posts.
Over the weekend, a developer named Marak Squires intentionally sabotaged his popular NPM package colors and his less popular package faker . As I write this, NPM claims 18,971 direct dependents for colors and 2,751 for faker . Open Source Insights counts at least 42,000 more indirect dependents for colors . Many…
Or: Why can't you just merge my ten-line PR already? I maintain over 200 open source projects. Apparently (this is news to me) I am ranked in the top 200 GitHub users by followers, and there are 18,000 forks and 42,000 stars across my repos. On an average day, I see between 50-100 emails across my repositories for…
A love letter to Ruby and Rails.
This post describes the inner workings of LatencyFleX, which is a set of libraries that achieves latency reduction for video games, made as a vendor-agnostic alternative to Nvidia Reflex. A technology called Nvidia Reflex was released in 2020. It drastically improved system latency, by adjusting the pacing of the…
Trashing legacy software is fun. It creates camaraderie.
If you go out seeking to learn why blockchains and the systems built atop them are apparently the future of our web, you’ll begin to see some common themes. These fall apart under further scrutiny.
Every day is different when you work on a nature reserve, but nothing could have prepared our reserves team at Rutland Water Nature Reserve for the day when they made the palaeontological discovery of a lifetime.
When starting a SaaS business you eventually arrive at the challenge of pricing and packaging. Many great articles have been written on the subject, we've read them all, and still we missed the mark. Here's our thoughts on version 2.0.
Start your freelance business on the right foot by avoiding common mistakes that you will hold you back from victory.
How trying out new laptops and messing with my personal computing setup motivated me to go back to a laptop that some would call ancient.
I have always liked pinout diagrams like this: Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.pngThey work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information…
What is Deno, why does it matter, and how is it currently used for server-side JavaScript?
This is a story of a small e-commerce merchant who signed up for Amazon Pay: a payment processing service similar to PayPal that leverages customers’ existing Amazon accounts. It all seemed so promising. Amazon Pay would provide an easier checkout experience for my customers, with the shipping address and payment…
Snyk issued a Denial of Service security vulnerability for colors@1.4.1, following this vulnerable code. We highly recommend you revert to colors@1.4.0, and pin your dependencies’ versions to avoid blind upgrades of the offending version. We also recommend you migrate to a different package.
Android 12, Pixel 6
“I’m going to be 29 anyways, so I might as well be 29 with a Master’s.” — me 5 years ago debating whether I should take classes On June 5, 2017, I started taking classes at Tufts University while working full time. On January 4, 2022, I submitted the final draft of my Master’s thesis. Much like my past self had hoped…
It's time to settle the endless internet debates.
Haleakalā and Maunakea, Hawai ʻ i – For the very first time, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant’s life, watching the massive star’s rapid self-destruction and final death throes before it collapsed into a Type II supernova.
Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here , continue with this , and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth .
In the two years after publishing this, I worked on refining this algorithm to power a real-time world generator, called Generate Worlds, and it lets you des...
OpenSSH agent restriction
My engineer friends are surprised when I mention I know and I even wrote code in the D programming language (aka Dlang).
51,000 business enthusiasts get my weekly digests. It could connect you with an investor or poke your business mindset (1.4M+ views.)
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
The JWST must perform a bewildering array of tasks — unfurling panels, mirrors and more — how can engineers trust telescope’s reliability?
In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves . The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.
