Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,196 posts.
When building a large scale, highly available and distributed system, what architecture concepts do you need to use, in practice? In this post, I am summarizing ones I have found essential to learn and apply when building the payments system that powers Uber. This is a system with a load
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
It’s been a decade since I blogged about the benefits of avoiding news. In that time I mostly followed the advice I gave. I kicked my addiction to The Daily Show in late 2016 after it switche…
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
I almost bought a scanner. Mainly for my Alpine Panoramics project . The key here is that I am still shooting most of these photos on a Hasselblad Xpan - a long since discontinued film camera that shoots two 35mm frames side by side to achieve a panoramic frame covering approximately 65x24mm.
How did Ethereum become a system that looks more like the current financial system than anything revolutionary and just?
We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way. In December 2020, John Gruber wrote: We knew this to be true: Computers could run fast and…
Generally good things to do when writing Go code, in 2016 and beyond.
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
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/
but how much exactly?
Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)
Use HTML5 localStorage to completely fill up Chrome, Safari, and IE users hard disks. Trololo...
Stories about computer security tend to go viral when they bridge the vast divide between geeks and luddites, and this week’s news about a hacker who tried to poison a Florida town’s water supply was understandably front-page material. But for security nerds who’ve been warning about this sort of thing for ages, the…
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…
Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier . I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop…
Several years ago I was courted by O’Reilly Media. After the success of my first book, Show Me the Numbers , the folks at O’Reilly were interested in publishing my second. I responded cautiously at first, because my prior self-publishing experience was extremely positive. Analytics Press, the publisher of Show Me the…
Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious…
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.
Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents . Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.
Obey the Law of Locality · ABD: Anything But Dropdowns · Pass the Squint Test · Teach by example
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
I was born in 1972 to a poverty-level family in suburban Chicago. During the first few years of my life, I shared a 600 sq ft, 1 bedroom cot...
For people who've worked through Mastery with SQL , a common question I get is "What's next?" If you completed the course and all 150+ exercises, at this point you'll have a very strong grasp of SQL and should be comfortable writing all sorts of complex queries. However, there's more to working with databases…
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
