Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,204 posts.
Lately I tend to stick to topics that are historic by at least twenty years, and that does have a lot of advantages. But I am supposedly a DevOps professional, and so I will occasionally indulge in giving DevOps advice... or at least opinions, which are sort of like advice but with less of a warranty.
Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts. Introduction Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while creating fiery infernos around them, and…
The penny first dropped for me just over 7 years ago to the day: The only secure password is the one you can't remember [https://www.troyhunt.com/only-secure-password-is-one-you-cant/]. In an era well before the birth of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.
ZCode silently uploads full Git history to the cloud; this post provides a block rule and source review — checkpoint claims fall apart against the code.
Blog about anti-virus software vulnerabilities.
Let's Encrypt have announced that on July 8th, 2019 they will begin issuing new certificates from their own intermediate CA and not their current cross-signed intermediate. Here's what that means and what action, if any, site operators need to take…
In this course we explain how category theory—a branch of mathematics known for its ability to organize the key abstractions that structure much of the mathematical universe—has become useful for writing elegant and maintainable code. In particular, we'll use examples from the Haskell programming language to motivate…
When you hear the term startup accelerator you likely think of YCombinator, TechStars or 500 Startups. Accelerators traditionally cater to "unicorns" – companies that have the potential to be worth at least a billion dollars. This focus has made them successful in launching startups l
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
Also: World League Basketball
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
So in my post Is this evil? I covered a way of tracking users with CSS. While thinking about those weird ways of using the web I also started thinking about pushing live data to clients without JS. Or at least maintaining a connection. So WebSockets requires JS. WebRTC requires JS. Even HLS (video streaming), which…
I made a Game Boy Color game that renders images in real time. The player controls an orbiting light and spins an object.
Things I Learned From Hundreds of Experiments
Why keep investing in a platform that's been disappointing me for a while?
Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions…
AI coding tools boost productivity but may sacrifice the flow state and deep satisfaction developers experience when writing code by hand. What are we losing?
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
AI commoditizes anything you can specify. It can't (yet) commoditize what requires ongoing operation.
There are many descriptions floating around the internet, trying to explain functional programming in simple terms. Unfortunately, most discuss details only loosely related to functional programming, while others focus on topics that are completely irrelevant. So of course, I had to write my own!
I’m on Team Firefox.
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
I’ve long thought that Zig was an interesting programming language, potentially more interesting than Rust in many respects given that Zig seems to be targetting a more modern C-like language replacement whereas Rust firmly looks like it is trying to take C++ out back like ol’ yeller. Rust is powerful, but the…
Vim easy mode is tough to use for seasoned users!
