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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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I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
I feel like I have no real interests or hobbies. My only interest is making money and the pursuit of any activity which can lead to that quickly. However, I feel like this attitude is robbing me of fulfillment and life experiences.
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What if we'd had better HTML-in-JS syntax all along?
I have a theory that a grave mistake was made in 1995 - the decision not to have a neat, succinct and declarative way of representing html elements in javascript. [On reading the hacker news comments this is pretty historically inaccurate, however, I think this article still stands as "look just how close javascript…
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Enjoy the Best, Not the Latest, Media
Tried and tested beats new and marketed
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SELECT wat FROM sql
Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.
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Gresham’s Law: Bad Drives Out Good as Time Passes (2009)
Gresham's Law is an economic principle that sates "the bad drives out the good" as time passes. The concept has many broad and far reaching consequences.
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Humans Are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter
Been a lot of "victim blaming" going on these last few days. The victim, through no fault of their own, has been the target of numerous angry tweets designed to ridicule their role in internet security and suggest they are incapable of performing their duty. Here's where it all
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Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime Is Mostly Boring
When law enforcement agencies tout their latest cybercriminal arrest, the defendant is often cast as a bravado outlaw engaged in sophisticated, lucrative, even exciting activity. But new research suggests that as cybercrime has become dominated by pay-for-service offerings, the vast majority of day-to-day activity…
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How YC will be funding the S20 batch
Hint: it will involve a lot of video calls
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I made a macro keypad with 3D-printed switches
Latest on the 3d-printed keyboard switch project: I've reached a switch design that I think is probably reliable enough, and I've put 3 of them together to form a macro keypad just to see how it all goes together before I commit to a full keyboard. I don't have a number for how many presses the switch lasts, other…
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Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner
This post will explore the famous winner of the first IOCCC contest, dive into the story behind the code, and even display the original source programs!
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PlantUML
share a model or diagram between all members of the team that they can all understand and contribute to and edit
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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
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1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
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Sir Ian McKellen's Lord of the Rings Production Blogs
Journal entry from 20 August 1999, introducing his new blog about The Lord of the Rings.
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Gradient Boosted Decision Trees
From zero to gradient boosted decision trees
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In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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What is the value of browser diversity?
In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It was a good story fraught with ups…
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Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps
After roughly five months of appeasing users with new feature after new feature after new feature , the other shoe has finally dropped. Today, Strava sold its segmented soul. At least, if you believe Strava Segments are the soul of what makes Strava, well, Strava.
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Ignore Sunk Costs (2009)
The most important decision-making rule you learn in business school is still largely misunderstood. When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the futu…
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Don't bet on the most likely winner
It's all relative
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An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
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The Shareware Scene, Part 4: Doom
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D ‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid…
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How to make a web app work offline
Service workers, caches, IndexedDB and PWA.