18901
Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting
I don't remember seeing this before at the bottom of the Craigslist posting form. I'm guessing this is the result of the Padmapper debacle?...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,223 posts.
18902
18903
Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
You should hire an old programmer. It’s true! Sure.. older programmers are not going to work as many hours as someone fresh out of college. They have kids and spouses and mortgages and softball games to attend. They won't hang out at the office playing Xbox and ping-pong all night. They will not work 80 hour weeks and…
18904
NP Complete 3rd Grade Math Problems (2018)
Leo’s third grade class got to try a Noyce Foundation math worksheet [1] the other day. They didn’t fare so well, but I gotta tell you, some of the problems are REALLY hard! In fact, on…
18905
18906
Gab Has Been Breached
I've investigated hundreds of data breaches over the years (there are 514 of them in Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] as I write this), and for the most part, the situation with Gab is just another day on the internet. But Gab is also different, having grown
18907
Lead is still bad for your brain
Wait, wasn't this solved by the Romans? Anyway, my grandma ate lead paint and she was totally fine.
18908
The Beauty of Clojure
Owen Rees-Hayward - Data Engineer, Software Developer, Certified Spark Developer
18909
I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes
This has to be the most infuriating bug report I've ever submitted. I went to type in my 2FA code on a website - but no numbers appeared on screen. Obviously, I was an idiot and had forgotten to press the NumLock button. D'oh! I toggled it on and typed again. No numbers appeared. I switched to another tab, my numbers…
18910
A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
18911
House Address “Twins” Proximity
In a previous post, I did a bit of analysis of the names of towns and streets . However, that clearly wasn’t enough to sate my bizarre interest in all things address-based, so here I am again with more street-name-based nerdery.
18912
Go modules have a v2+ problem
Go has a problem. Go modules place a strange naming requirement on modules version 2 or greater. Module names on modules v2+ must end in the major version ala …/v2 , and communication of this rule has been weak. It's non-obvious, and the community at large does not understand it.
18913
My First BillG Review (2006)
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
18914
Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters
One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I…
18915
Lowercase letters save data
Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each.
18916
Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
18917
The falling nutritional value of crops
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
18918
18919
Baby's First Garbage Collector
When I get stressed out and have too much to do, I have this paradoxical reaction where I escape from that by coming up with another thing to do. Usually it’s a tiny self-contained program that I can write and finish.
18920
What I've learned from jj
How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control.
18921
18922
GitHub Actions limitations and gotchas
I’ve been leading a team at my dayjob to migrate every engineering team to GitHub Actions (GHA)
18923
18924
18925
18926
Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
18927
Tests that sometimes fail
Over the years one of the most complex issues we have had to deal with at Discourse was flaky tests, in this post I would like to talk a bit about the various patterns we have come across and ways we tackle this issue.
18928
Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt
Over the years of troubleshooting performance problems in the Unix/Linux world, I have seen multiple cases where a regularly used command line tool in a customer server just stops working for some reason. The tool just returns immediately, doing absolutely nothing. No output printed, no coredumps and the exit code is…
18929
The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware (2020)
Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and…
18930