Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
Python dicts are now ordered
There were several moments over the last few weeks when I heard people discuss differences between Python lists and dicts and one of the first ones mentioned was that lists are ordered and dicts are not.
When in doubt: hang up, look up, and call back
Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken…
Why I’m Leaving Elm
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
Biohacking Lite
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
Siri, What Time Is It in London?
Every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.
Hard Startups
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or...
Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
Contents Contents
To get good, go after the metagame
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?
Palindrome Day 20200202
Sonstiges - Learn more about palindromic dates in 2020 and in the near future. 2020-02-02 (YYYMMDD) or 02.02.2020 (DDMMYYY) and others.
Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is the perfect deployment system for all your side projects. It is dirt cheap, fully managed serverless and scalable.
I'm Open Sourcing the Have I Been Pwned Code Base
Let me just cut straight to it: I'm going to open source the Have I Been Pwned code base. The decision has been a while coming and it took a failed M&A process to get here, but the code will be turned over to the public for the
Second-Guessing the Modern Web
What if everyone's wrong?
“Let’s use Kubernetes.” Now you have eight problems
For smaller teams, Kubernetes is usually the wrong solution: too complex, too complicated, and with too much work to keep it running.
Please read the paper before you comment
Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it— maple cocaine (@maplecocaine) January 3, 2019 Yesterday the main character of...
Don't touch my clipboard
Looking for an em dash I was recently trying to find an em dash character to use in a piece of writing. Since I don’t have the shortcut memorized—for future reference, shift+option+minus on Mac—I did a quick search for it. I didn’t see one on the search results page to copy, so I clicked into the first result: “The…
I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
A (possible) solution to Covid-19
Notice. Since this seems to be such a common question I think I should describe my background. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and I was once a tenured academic (professor). I now work in the biotech sector. I have published a number of peer reviewed papers in virology. If you really want to know more about me…
Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
Certain layouts are surprisingly dastardly. On the modern web, one of the most common layouts is also one of the trickiest. In this tutorial, I break down how to build the "full-bleed" layout using CSS Grid.
The EARN IT act is an attack on end-to-end encryption
Yesterday a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a new bill called the EARN IT act. On its face, the bill seems like a bit of inside baseball having to do with legal liability for informati…
Most tech content is bullshit
“One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.” ~ Carl Sagan
An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
Web by Google (TM)
Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay. Mozilla’s deal with Google will account for at least 70% of their revenues going forward. That’s over $400 million to be the default search provider in 4% of browsers. For 1…
The Polygons of Another World
There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…
How to burn the most money with a single click in Azure
The twit was followed by a very productive discussion, with many nice people trying to figure out even better ways to spend money on AWS. As an Azure user, I felt sad and left out, so I decided to fix this injustice. If you are in quarantine and you have insane amounts of money to spend, I got you covered: you only…