181
The JVM is not that heavy
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
182
Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it.…
183
Encrypted email is still a pain
Today I sent an email to somebody who specified that he "prefers GPG mail". I didn't have any GPG set up, so I just sent a normal email, which worked perfectly well. But it made me look in to GPG, and this is what I learnt...
184
185
186
187
On React and WordPress
Big companies like to bury unpleasant news on Fridays: A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they have decided to dig in on their patent clause addition to the React license, even after Apache had sa…
188
189
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
190
How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails
Did I mention how awesome it is to live 30 minutes from a ski lift?In March of 2016, I launched a course called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Sinc...
191
Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
192
Kotlin Is Better
I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.
193
The Kolmogorov option
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
194
195
196
197
Replacing Disqus with GitHub Comments
I considered removing comments from the blog after looking into Disqus load-time behaviour and seeing what it was imposing on visitors.
198
There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…
199
200
Rejection Letter
I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more…
201
If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
In the early 1960s, Richard Feynman gave a series of undergraduate lectures that were collected into a book called the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Absent from
202
Engineering management lessons (2014)
Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started.
203
New Features Coming in PostgreSQL 10
The list of new features coming in PostgreSQL 10 is extremely impressive. I've been involved in the PostgreSQL project since the 8.4 releas...
204
Snowflake macro photography (2013)
Snowflake macro photography: how to take closeup images of real snow crystals with simple optical add-on for compact camera? In this article, you'll find detailed description of shooting and photo processing techniques, scheme of optical add-on, snowflake pictures gallery, tips and tricks, useful links. Author: Alexey…
205
Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
206
Curl is C
For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →
207
208
Git git git git git
Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box: $ git git status git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git…
209
Super Tiny Website Logos in SVG
You may not realise it, but bandwidth is expensive. It costs you time, money, and battery power whenever you download a file larger than it needs to be. That's why I've become a little bit obsessed with SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. They're the closest thing to magic that the web has when it comes to image…
210
American Equity
I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of...