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The architecture behind a one-person tech startup
As grandiose as the title of this article might sound, I should clarify we’re talking about a low-stress, one-person company that I run from my flat here in Germany.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
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NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup
Many moons ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... London was in full bloom of tech-startups. I was running my own consultancy. Dashing from business to business, trying to pick up work as an expert in this new-fangled "Mobile Internet" thing. Some of the companies I worked with were great. Some of…
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Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
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Reddit’s disrespectful design
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
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Apple’s Mistake
While it’s possible to understand Apple’s motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving…
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Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)
JavaScript has come a long way since I knew it as the “D” in DHTML. For anyone like me, who’s been reluctant to use the latest syntax that could require polyfills or a transpiler, I’ve written this cheatsheet to get you caught up on all the goodness that’s widely supported in modern browsers.
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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
A corporate tale of greed, desperation, and the power of expectations. And a little bit about Capacitors.
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Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend
I’ve been having this thought on the back of my mind for a long time to write about why it’s often a bad idea to start with microservices for a brand new project.
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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely…
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Are Xiaomi browsers spyware? Yes, they are (2020)
Xiaomi browsers collect not merely your browsing history but also searches, downloads, YouTube videos watched and much more.
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A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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The 'Fuck You' Pattern
In the software industry, there is a term for intentional designs which coerce the user into doing something, be it consciously or subconsciously - a ‘dark pattern’. These patterns are employed by social media networks, e-commerce, video games, and many more places. I’m coining a new term called the ‘Fuck You’ pattern…
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My Current HTML Boilerplate
Every element I use for the basic structure of a HTML document, with explanations why.
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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
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Software engineering topics I changed my mind on
At some point, I realized I would've argued the exact opposite position on a lot of topics just a few years ago.
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How to grow sodium chloride crystals at home
After trying for 3 years, I found a way to grow transparent, high quality sodium chloride crystals at home. Here's my procedure.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’
A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of 'free shipping' that is anything but free.
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QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time
Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
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Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
Google can and will permanently ban your Android app if Google thinks you’ve clicked on your own ads
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30k U.S. organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft Exchange Server
At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources…
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I Still Use RSS
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
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Screw it, I’ll host it myself
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Likewise, it’s all fun and games until someone loses access to their private and/or business data because they trusted it to someone else.
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