Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,218 posts.
One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from…
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
If you are interested in truth, be it in the form of scientific knowledge or artistic beauty, there is no way around Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. In this book Kant asked the simple…
The idea is to come up with some kind of category, so that people have something to remember all the names by. Some categories: Geographical (countries, cities, parks, rivers, lakes, streets), entertainment (flintsones, simpsons, disney films, celebrities), companies (hotels, airports, local shops, restarants)…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
How we interact with programming environment matters more than the language, but such interaction has never been widely studied. Inspired by the idea of 'complementary science', this essay recovers interesting ideas from how programming used to be done using Commodore 64 BASIC. Reading about interactions is not enough…
After all the recent NSA revelations, it's been even more important to use Free Software on our mobile phones. Let me express this in another way: We should be very careful about what software we use on a device that is always on and in our pocket 24h a day. Starting from the very basic thing tha...
Before I was a maintainer of open source software I was a user of open source software, and I sometimes behaved badly.
The infrastructure underlying AS54316 -- the network supporting the services offered by the AP Foundation -- has historically been based out of a datacenter in NYC (NetActuate in Telehouse Chelsea). To add some resiliency, I thought it'd be interesting -- and a potentially fun challenge -- to leverage some spare real…
Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly…
I hear a lot of talk these days about TDD and BDD and Extreme Programming and SCRUM and stand up meetings and all kinds of methodologies and techniques for developing better software, but it’s all irrelevant unless the software we’re building meets the needs of those that are using it. Let me put that another way. A…
A few years ago I met a guy, let’s call him Jim, who was trying to break in tech by going to a bootcamp to become a developer. In the meantime, he worked as a bartender and had been living off the support of his girlfriend, who was from a well-off family and Jim was her trophy boyfriend. He approached me because he…
When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TAFE (this is like a trade school in Australia, though…
It has been over a year since I cancelled my Cloudflare account. They keep emailing me and haven't taken me off their marketing lists despite repeated requests. Their CTO told me he would investigate, but nothing changed. Their Data Protection Office hasn't respond to my requests. Cloudflare do not appear to respect…
Algebraic data types and algebraic data structures sound similar. It’s like they ought to be the same thing. But they’re not. They both have ‘algebraic’ in the name, so it’s confusing. I got them mixed up at times. Others have too. But, they’re different concepts. Understanding the difference will help if you’re…
In this article, I present the Linux file system NILFS and its automatic continuous snapshoting system.
Ten years ago this week, in May 2015, the JSON Web Token (JWT) became RFC 7519 . This was the culmination of a 4.5 year journey to create a simple JSON-based security token format and underlying JSON-based cryptographic standards. The full set of RFCs published together was:
Note: I just spoke at Coldfront 2017 about why I’m such a big proponent of the Web. What follows is essentially that talk as a blog post (I’ll add a link to the video once it is published).
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
How close are we to building the hosts?
(This is Part II of the Faster Ruby posts, which started with a retrospective on Ruby+OMR, a Ruby JIT compiler I worked on five years ago )
Here in this modern world, you talk to your friends over all kinds of different media: SMS, Facebook, Twitter DMs, GChat, and maybe even AIM if you're really old. These conversations aren't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever. You don't just throw your letters in the trash…
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
