9961
The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.
9962
When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
9963
9964
3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
9965
9966
That's not how 2FA works
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. Tess Rinearson@_tessrIs this a phishing attempt? Goes to "githubverification.com" and asks for username and pw (if so, it nearly got me!) /cc @github pic.x.com/jgt4oNvjF2❤️ 2,243💬 111🔁 016:12 - Sat 16 January 2021 In the replies, you’ll see lots of…
9967
9968
9969
9970
Anti-Patterns in Python Programming
A collection of the most unfortunate but occasionally subtle issues I’ve seen in code written by students new to writing Python.
9971
We’ll call it AI to sell it, machine learning to build it
An AI Public Service Announcement
9972
Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
9973
macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses
I’m sometimes late to notice new and terrible things about macOS 26 Tahoe, because I use it only for testing, on a secondary Mac. My main Mac remains on Sequoia, as enforced by Little Snitch . I was of course aware that app windows on Tahoe have exaggerated corner radiuses, but I was unaware until now that the window…
9974
9975
ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”: So the first thing to note here is that…
9976
Paper sizes
Update Apr 22, 2016: I’ve made a video which explains most of what is in this blogpost:Two standardsYes, this blogpost is about paper. This has absolutely no...
9977
Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
9978
A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
9979
Go: Ten years and climbing
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of Go. The initial discussion ...
9980
Discipline Doesn’t Scale
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they'd write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who've worked it out. The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and...
9981
Life, death, and retirement
I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason.My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for b…
9982
Eldar Black Holes
Isaac Asimov, in one of the anthologies he edited, mentioned reading some astronomical news back in the early 1960s about neutron stars. Being a science popularizer as well as a science fiction author, he was inspired to write a science essay about neutron stars. This was read by a few people but then more or less…
9983
The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
9984
Tarsnap price cut
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
9985
9986
How A Pull Request Rocked My World
This is a story about Pull Request
9987
What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
9988
9989
Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle
Amazon removed purchased e-books from Kindles when a publisher had second thoughts about online distribution.
9990
Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
For Christmas, I gave my parents this e-ink picture frame (built from an old e-reader) that cycles through photos from a shared iCloud photo album: