Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
A surprisingly long cycle has just closed for me and I think it’s a good time to share some lessons learned. I have been collecting these points in the last six months, but none of them poppe…
In the beginning, it was just me and the (plain) terminal. Then I started using Byobu, because it was company-standard at my first job. Later I installed tmux on my personal computer because it seemed more popular. And every time I work on a remote server, I use Screen. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
I was reading yet another blog post titled "Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y> (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
In the beginning, things were simple: you had two strings (a username and a password) and if someone knew both of them, they could log in. Easy. But the ecosystem in which they were used was simple too, for example in MIT's Time-Sharing Computer [https://www.wired.com/
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
After being an early adopter of Facebook and using it for over a decade, I decided to delete my account. Here's why.
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
My current "investment thesis" is that what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers. When it comes to eking performance out of hand-authored JavaScript and accompanying runtime libraries, we've reached the point of diminishing returns.
Ever since Deep Learning hit the scene in speech recognition, word error rates have fallen dramatically. But despite articles you may have read, we still don’t have human-level speech recognition. Speech recognizers have many failure modes. Acknowledging these and taking steps towards solving them is critical to…
The LA Times is a good newspaper and is currently doing the best political coverage in California. They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker …
If you have a software background and you want to pick up digital design,then one of the first things you need to learn about early on is the conceptof the c...
Nothing! Just kidding, you’ll see a lot of distressed messages from tasks that passed out wait for the phone to ring, and woke up wearing someone else’s OS thread. 1
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
As software developers, I think we can agree that open-source 1 code has transformed the world . Its public nature tears down the walls that prevent some pieces of software from becoming the best they can be. The problem is that too many valuable projects stagnate, with burned-out leaders:
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
I’m CC’d on mails when things get slow, but never when things work as expected or are fast…oh well. Like an umpire in baseball, if we are doing our jobs, we are invisible. Subjec…
I think I might be getting old, but it took me completely by surprise that the Mac Mini we use in our lounge room as our TV was 6 years old. It's been such a...
Working on a project for a client recently, I needed to speak the SSH protocol in Golang code. So I started with the x/crypto/ssh package, part of the suite of libraries from the Golang developers which is not part of the standard library and not part of their usual compatibility guarantees, but more along the lines…
One of the biggest realisations I’ve come to as part of my PhD, is how little people care about how I spend my time, they only care about what I am able to deliver. Yet in order to deliver, you need to finish. I was recently reading an article on this topic, and I think the advice can be best summed up as:
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
