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Resignation Letter
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
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Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
Privacy regulations such as the GDPR say that you need to seek permission from your website visitors before tracking them. Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be…
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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
That half-finished thing you threw on PyPI and forgot about? The world is genuinely slightly better for it existing.
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The Beauty of Unix Pipelines
Some examples of using unix tools in a pipeline
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The Era of Visual Studio Code
Roben Kleene’s blog
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Create diagrams with code using Graphviz
Have you ever had to draw an architecture diagram and found the repetitive clicking and dragging tedious? Did you have to do modifications to that diagram and found it complicated? Graphviz is an open source graph visualization software that allows us to decribe a diagram using code, and have it automatically drawn…
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Modeling a Wealth Tax
A wealth tax will usually have a threshold at which it starts. How much difference would a high threshold make? To model that, we need to make some assumptions about the initial value of your stock and the growth rate. Suppose your stock is initially worth $2 million, and the company's trajectory is as follows: the…
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Suspicious Discontinuities
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
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Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer
My high-level workflow looks something like this: identify the problem to solve; think on the problem and let ideas percolate; research, discuss, and experiment with these ideas; implement and test the solution; deliver and maintain the solution.
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The unexpected Google wide domain check bypass
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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Six Figures in 6 days
This title is a little misleading.
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How to sell a B2B product
Lately, a bunch of early stage founders have emailed me to ask for go-to-market (GTM) advice. They have a real product, it solves a real problem for their handful of customers…
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Interview advice that got me offers
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?”
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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How to contact Google SRE by dropping a shell in Cloud SQL
Note: The vulnerabilities that are discussed in this post were patched quickly and properly by Google. We support responsible disclosure. The research that resulted in this post was done by me and …
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Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account
Then one must ask, why is the New York Post's Twitter account still locked?
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U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise
Communications at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on SolarWinds , a security vendor that helps the federal government and a range of Fortune 500 companies monitor the health of their IT networks. Given the breadth of the company’s customer base, experts…
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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Startup financial models – Templates compared for SaaS
Need a financial model for your startup? Fear not. I have extensively compared the top 12 templates, free and paid, so you don't have to do it.
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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to start your argument with ‘everyone knows,’ but in this case, I think we ought to make an…
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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
The views expressed in this newsletter are solely my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
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Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
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Please stop using CDNs for external JavaScript libraries
I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network like so: Copied HTML to 📋⧉ HTML<script src="https://cdn.example.com/js/library-v1.2.3.js"></script> There are, supposedly, a…
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John Conway
I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with …
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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
To reach its potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.