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I Still Use RSS
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,175 posts.
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Fixing Macs door to door
Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.
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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet…
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I will not do a tech interview
I am terrible at taking tech interviews. Out of dozens that I’ve done, I may never have passed one. My typical pattern goes like this: A serendipitous contact leads to outstanding phone call with a …
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HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
How hiring is becoming a luck filter.
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Keep the Internet Open
The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon. The internet is a public good, and I believe access should be a...
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Enough Is Enough
I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music. The mess around the Lodsys patents should be a wake up call to everyone involved in the patent business (government bureaucrats…
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An off-grid social network
Open Source Freelancer
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How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
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Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: The Ban of VLC
This page has moved to https://martinfinkel.com/blog/unity-double-oss-standards/ .
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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.
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Data structures and algorithms I actually used while working at tech companies
Do you actually use data structures and algorithms on your day to day job? I've noticed a growing trend of people assuming algorithms are pointless questions that are asked by tech companies purely as an arbitrary measure. I hear more people complain about how all of this is a
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Write Code Every Day
Last fall, work on my coding side projects came to a head: I wasn’t making adequate progress and I couldn’t find a way to get more done without sacrificing my ability to do effective work at Khan Academy .
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The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
Gmail's "dots don't matter" feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails.
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Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
Adria Richards was an attendee at PyCon, a tech conference, as part of her job as a developer evangelist at Sendgrid, a tech company that manages emails. She took offense to a conversation two men,…
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HTML Can Do That
HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.
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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced "age verification" regulations. They present it as the classic "save the children" talking ...
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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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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Programming books you might want to consider reading
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the…
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Old CSS, New CSS
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with. I’ve been taking for…
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Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with …
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I quit the tech industry
This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job. Or another job at all. Ever.
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The Bullshit Web
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]