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Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
1322
Psychic Paper: iOS Sandbox Escape
Siguza’s Blog
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Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
Chase Sunset & Vine, 2012. Painting by Alex Schaefer There is a fundamental asymmetry to banking. Banks don't like to share higher inte...
1325
You’re not writing code, you’re solving problems
If you go beyond software, and frameworks, beyond test suites and sprints and Jira tickets, you will always find a problem that needs to be solved.
1326
Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
Repeatedly reaching for your mouse slows you down in the short term, and in the long term brings on health problems (RSI). To stay fast and healthy...
1327
How I bypassed Cloudflare's SQL Injection filter
astrocamel, Blog, Portfolio, George Skouroupathis
1328
Little Tasks, Little Trust
Why Delegating Responsibilities Beats Micromanagement
1329
Receiving images of Earth from satellites with software defined radio
FM radio headphones were given out at the door. Each set was tuned beforehand to receive a broadcast from my programmed station. Visitors were then invited to walk around the room, contemplating the artifacts of the exhibit.
1330
"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
Tough questions to ask your remote employer who gives you Cost Of Living based compensation and some thoughts on how remote compensation will work in the future
1331
The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients
Regular readers will know that I'm very active in the CA / PKI space and even deliver a 2-day advanced training course [https://www.feistyduck.com/training/the-best-ssl-and-tls-training-in-the-world] on the topic. Over the last year or so I've been watching
1332
Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
The long-time host of PBS NewsHour Jim Lehrer died this week at the age of 85. In this age of news as entertainment and opinion as news, Lehrer seems like one o
1333
Improving my productivity as a working programmer (2017)
For the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with improving my productivity. During this time, I’ve continuously been monitoring the amount of work I’ve been getting done and have been experimenting with changes to make myself more productive. After only two months, I can now get significantly more work done than I did…
1334
AWS’s Share of Amazon’s Profit
I’ve often heard it said that AWS is a major contributor to Amazon’s profitability. How major? Here’s a graph covering the last ten quarters, with a brief methodology discussion:
1335
Pinboard Turns Eleven
Pinboard is eleven years old today! Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats:
1336
Towards Principled Reactive UI
Update 7 May 2022: A followup to this post containing significant conceptual advance is Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust. I consider the Crochet experiment to be mostly negative, as there were a number of ergonomic and functional “paper cuts,” though several of the research goals were met, at least to some extent.
1337
GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
1338
Why does writing matter in remote work?
In remote work, we communicate primarily through writing. We send messages in Slack. We document projects in Notion. We send meeting invites with a written description of the purpose. We’re writing all the time. Many organizations are working from home at the moment. Thus, writing is even
1339
Back of the envelope estimation hacks
There are two types of engineers, the ones that can quickly do estimates and the ones that can’t. Are these people just smarter, or is there more to it? Enrico Fermi was a master at estimation Back of the envelope estimation is a skill that can be learned with practice. It becomes easier once you get familiar with…
1340
How I built the best-selling BlackBerry app
Many years ago, I built what I believe was the best-selling BlackBerry app of all-time, BBSmart Email Viewer. It feels strange to write that, and it's not something I'd say I'm really known for outside of the small niche community of BlackBerry app developers that used to exist. But of course this had a huge impact on…
1341
The Recursive Universe
A few years ago I came across this video, showing a complex machine built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life:
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Stripe responded to my concerns about user tracking
Stripe has made several significant, positive changes to its user tracking and privacy policies in the last week.
1345
Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
The Doomsday Algorithm gives the day of the week for any date (and you can do it in your head)
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8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
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Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
1350
Cider 1.0
You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. – Maya Angelou CIDER started its life as an effort to replace a hacked version of SLIME1 with a proper environment for Clojure development on Emacs. Many of you probably don’t remember those days, but initially almost everyone was using a…