Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
The Web in 2050
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…
Glob Matching Can Be Simple and Fast Too
Here’s a straightforward benchmark. Time how long it takes to run ls ( a* ) n b in a directory with a single file named a 100 , compared to running ls | grep ( a.* ) n b . Superscripts denote string repetition and parentheses are for grouping only, so that when n is 3, we’re running ls a*a*a*b in a directory…
Papercraft with Blender
Blender version 2.79 incorporated functionality which enables you to fabricate 3D models by folding paper. I decided to try it out. Drawing the model I downloaded a 3D model of a goat and re-meshed…
I spent three months working full time to get a job
A retrospective on the technical interview process based on three months of searching for a job.
Startups should not use React
That is, if you ever hope to be acquired by a larger company
Skip grep, use awk
Jonathan Palardy's blog about technology
Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow
No, it's not rampant abuse, weak leadership, or a product that intimidates new users. The roots of Twitter's stagnation go back to 2010.
Three Years on Google App Engine
For the last 3 years I worked on an application that runs on Google App Engine. It is a fascinating, unique piece of service Google is offering here. Unlike anything you’ll find elsewhere. This is my in-depth, personal take on it.
Equifax Argentinian portal secured with admin/admin
Equifax last week disclosed a historic breach involving Social Security numbers and other sensitive data on as many as 143 million Americans. The company said the breach also impacted an undisclosed number of people in Canada and the United Kingdom. But the official list of victim countries may not yet be complete…
Staying with the US Digital Service
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…
My Go Resolutions for 2017
’Tis the season for resolutions, and I thought it would make sense to write a little about what I hope to work on this year as far as Go is concerned.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Beginners
A description of ECC without using advanced math
Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update
You know what really surprised me about this whole WannaCry ransomware problem [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/]? No, not how quickly it spread. Not the breadth of organisations it took offline either and no, not even that so many of them hadn'
Lisp Quickstart
George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science advances research and education in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, software engineering, and other computing fields. As part of Virginia’s largest public research university, the department connects researchers and students with government…
3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go
January 31st 2017 was my last day at Canonical, after working for 3.5 years on what is one of the largest open source projects written in Go - Juju .
Linting HTML using CSS
Articles on frontend development and more.
A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…
Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
The slow currentTimeMillis()
Today we’ll look at one of the most basic and the most often used methods from the Java library: System.currentTimeMillis() .