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How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS
You Don’t Have To Get Covered on Large Blogs, Why Churn Rate is Surprisingly Low, Spend a Lot of Time At User Forum, etc..
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
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CLI: Improved
I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university wh…
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Let’s talk about usernames
A few weeks ago I released [django-registration](/projects/django-registration/) 2.4.1. The 2.4 series is the last in the django-registration 2.x line, and …
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Why you should not use Google Cloud
FINAL UPDATE (25-March-2022): Because of this article, we often keep getting asked if we still use GCP and if we would recommend it to…
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Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
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GDPR: Don't Panic
In another week the GDPR , or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
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DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS
A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had…
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Mmm, Pi-hole
I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their
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"Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords
Last August, I launched a little feature within Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) I called Pwned Passwords [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-million-freely-downloadable-pwned-passwords/]. This was a list of 320 million passwords from a range of different data breaches which organisations…
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Bye bye BetterSlack
I wrote BetterSlack and Slack asked me to take it down. Find the story here.
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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
We've all experienced frustration with the internet going down. Now imagine how frustrated you'd be if you found out that your ISP intentionally blocked your internet access for the purpose of advertising their software; and better yet, your ISP claimed that state legislators required them to do it!...
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NASA’s IMAGE satellite, lost since 2005, is alive
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This t…
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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?
Years ago, I used Google Talk with almost everyone I talked to. Nowadays, I talk with almost no one on Hangouts. Google Talk has changed from
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
How we overvalue the wrong technology and novel aspects of interface design at the expense of substantial gains to our productivity.
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Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash
Recently I wanted to deepen my understanding of bash by researching as much of it as possible. Because I felt bash is an often-used (and under-understood) technology, I ended up writing a book on it .
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Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov , are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors…
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
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Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
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Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets
This'll be my first blog post on the internet, ever. Hopefully it's interesting and accurate. Please point out any mistakes if you see any!
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
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Slack's bait and switch
Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways. True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have a Slack account and…