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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
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Giving a shit as a service
A mental model for service businesses.
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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
When good ideas make bad business
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Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount (2018)
I designed and 3D Printed a Canon EF Mount for my Game Boy Camera.
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Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
One of the skills I wish I’d learned earlier in my career is basic Linux server administration. Specifically in relation to hosting something on the web, either a web app or API that I wrote myself, or something from the thriving self-hosted community , such as WordPress. Managing servers is increasingly seen as the…
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The deception of “buying” digital movies
World of Matthew is a personal website, like few others. Not just a blog but also provides reviews and video content
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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
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`COPY –chmod` reduced the size of my container image by 35%
Earlier this week, I was writing a Dockerfile to download and run a binary when I noticed the image size was way more than what I would expect. I’m using ubuntu:21.10 as the base image, which is about 70MB. The binary I’m running is about 80MB. Other packages I’m installing would add 10-ish MB. But the image size is…
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On Leaving Facebook
After 8.5 years at Facebook I joined a small startup called Replit. Leaving wasn't easy, and during the process I've talked to half a dozen friends who were ...
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DRY is an over-rated programming principle?
I figured I'd kick off my new blog with the most click baity thing I could think of. I suspect any developer reading this is aware of the DRY principle becau...
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The Cult Inside Google
I worked for Google for about three and a half years as a video producer. I was fired because I raised alarm about a doomsday cult that…
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Aging programmer
Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. To celebrate that this turned out to be completely false, here are some assorted reflections as a 40-year-old programmer that looks back: • Compared to my…
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How to design a house to last 1000 years
At last, we’re finally ready to put together the design for our house. A fully specified design, with every detail and system described, is well beyond the scope of this newsletter (not to mention the scope of my knowledge). But we can give a high-level schematic design, laying out the basic building systems and how…
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Resolving an unusual WiFi issue
Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.
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A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements
A mysterious voice is moaning and grunting on American Airlines' in-flight announcement systems, and nobody knows who or how they're doing it.
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Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others
Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.
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I stopped advertising and nothing happened
What happens when you turn off all of your Internet advertising? Apparently, nothing. This post explores how I came to the decision to turn off all ads, and what I found as a result.
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Unlearning perfectionism
A way out from the perfectionism trap
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I wish my web server were in the corner of my room
Posted on Monday 10 Oct 2022. 1,417 words, 11 links. By Matt Webb.
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SSH tips and tricks
Since I joined Charm, I’ve been working and learning more about SSH, and I thought I would share a few quick tips and tricks with you.
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Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring
Which is good! Boring = success
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Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
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I found a bug in SQLite
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite. The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let's take a look at the…
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The Curse of NixOS
I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. On the other hand, it's…
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Rust: A Critical Retrospective
Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
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TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
The HTML capture attribute is interesting because it allows you to activate a user's camera with just HTML. This article covers it in more depth.