Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,203 posts.
How to Report a Bug to Microsoft
So you found a bug in one of Microsoft’s great works of software art. What do you do now? I realized that there isn’t a nice step-by-step guide online, so I will give you the low-down on how this process works. It’s not straightforward — Microsoft is a large company, and has probably thousands of calls or reports each…
Your data model is your destiny
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
Engineering principles for building financial systems
Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.
Assange Trial Day 18
It is hard to believe, but Judge Baraitser on Friday ruled that there will be no closing speeches in the Assange extradition hearing. She accepted the proposal initially put forward by counsel for the US government, that closing arguments should simply be submitted in writing and without an oral hearing. This was…
10th Anniversary of JQuery
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of jQuery. I announced it back at BarCamp NYC 2006 when I was still in college. It’s incredible to think of how far it’s come and just how many people have contributed to its success. To them I am forever grateful, thank you.
I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS
A guide on how to compile the X Window System for iOS
How Convolutional Neural Networks Work
Find the rest of the How Neural Networks Work video series in this free online course .
Conway's Gradient of Life
What happens if we start from this configuration and take a single step of the game? Here is a snapshot of the next generation:
What’s so great about functional programming anyway?
To hear some people talk about functional programming, you’d think they’d joined some kind of cult. They prattle on about how it’s changed the way they think about code. They’ll extol the benefits of purity, at length. And proclaim that they are now able to “reason about their code”—as if all other code is irrational…
Do AI companies work?
The market needs to be irrational for you to stay solvent.
Laid Off, Now What?
As an immigrant on an H1B, you have exactly 60 days to find a new job when you are laid-off. This is a very short window of time to explore and land any job, let alone a job that matches your skills and interests. I found myself in this situation along with many others when Uber announced layoffs earlier this year…
What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about how penny auction sites make you money. As a reaction, some readers sent me links to day trading brokers that promise easy returns. These brokers allow private investors to hold stocks or currencies positions for a short time which makes it possible to speculate on small…
Designing Low Upkeep Software
It's common for me to get excited about a personal project, put a bunch of time into it, and then lose interest. As much as possible, I want these projects to continue working; upkeep isn't fun. What does designing for minimum maintenance look like? The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them…
To learn a new language, read its standard library
The best way to learn a new programming language, just like a human language, is from example. To learn how to write code you first need to read someone else’s code. But who is the best person to learn from? Which code should we read? Where should we look to find it?
Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy
This post made it to the top of Hacker News, sparking some great debate. See the discussion here. It’s a common narrative in tech to design products with the assumption that users are stupid …
I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it
As a part of my work I do security research for various apps and websites. I wanted to see if LLMs could reproduce a common class of exploits I've found in multiple apps. So I built a deliberately vulnerable book review app and spent $1,500 finding out…
Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel
After languishing through the CPU dark-ages (read: Intel trying real hard to keep people on 4 cores so they could charge an arm and a leg for more), the last two years has seen a vertible tsunami of advances in CPU technologies. AMD's introduction of an 8-core CPU (the 1700X) began the rat-race and with both AMD and…
Just disconnect the internet
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content update. Rough day at the office, huh? There are lots of things you could say about this, lots of reasons it happens this way, lots of people to blame and not to…
Go Concurrency Distilled
Interactive mini-book on concurrent programming in Go.
How Home Assistant is being used to protect from missile and drone attacks
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant
UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M
Or, as they like to call it, the 'AI Skills Hub'. Which was built by PwC because of course it was
Userscripts Are Fun and Are Still Very Much Relevant
Sharing my thoughts on userscripts, a phenomenon the swept the internet back in the 00s.
An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
This post has everything you need to know about xargs , an essential tool for shell programming . It's based on my # comments on this "wrong" post: