6121
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,816 posts.
6122
Plain text, with lines
I like plain text. I also like doodling while I write. Some things are just easier to explain with a picture. But if I need to draw a picture today, I need to stop writing plain text, pick an app, dismiss a couple of dialogs or tours of new features in front of my face, think about all the ways it's acting for its…
6123
Never Trust Facebook
I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I didn’t want to remove my account and have no visibility on how or what Facebook might be showing about me or someone using my name. So I decide…
6124
20 years working on the same software product
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
6125
Why I built a dictionary app
This story begins the same way as with every other app, with a problem. None of the available apps satisfied what I expected from a dictionary
6126
Deno Sandbox
Instant Linux microVMs with defense-in-depth security for running untrusted code.
6127
6128
Osquery: Expose the operating system as a relational database
Visit the post for more.
6129
6130
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
An adorable set of release notes
6131
Takeaways from coaching CEOs, founders and VCs
I went through my calendar recently to count all the clients I worked with in 2019 as part of my coaching practice. The answer: 101 powerful and extraordinary individuals. Wow, I was blown away, I had no idea that it would be this many. The kinds of people I had and continue to have the […]
6132
Networking on AWS (2018)
Disclaimer: I’m not a network engineer and never have been - a tame network engineer has been consulted to ensure factual and terminological accuracy. The following is an in-exhaustive run down of everything I’ve learnt from building and using network infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. If you find you have no…
6133
Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…
6134
6135
6136
Discord is not an acceptable choice for free software projects
It’s simple: free software projects should not use Discord. (This goes equally for any sort of public interest group.) Here’s why. TL;DR: Standardizing on…
6137
Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with
An overview of the ongoing efforts to improve and roll out support for free-threaded CPython throughout the Python open source ecosystem
6138
AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
AI handles writing code but leaves the hard work: investigation, context, validation. Why vibe coding has limits and AI assistance can backfire.
6139
Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. An…
6140
It's 2026, Just Use Postgres
Stop managing multiple databases. Postgres extensions replace Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Redis, MongoDB, and InfluxDB with BM25, vectors, JSONB.
6141
I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
I recently submitted my PhD thesis , and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I’d write about something you (hopefully) wouldn’t notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn’t.
6142
6143
A short conversation with a bank
This issue imagines a darkly comic conversation between an exasperated customer and their bank, capturing the cascading frustrations of modern financial services: deleted digital statements that…
6144
The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
6145
Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
6146
Don't give away historic details about yourself
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away…
6147
PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom, used his nearly 20-year-old PayPal account to put his money where his mouth is. His primary use of the payment system was to fund servers to run Tor nodes, routing internet traffic in order to safeguard privacy and avoid country-level...
6148
6149
Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
I’ll be attending Babashka Conf on May 8 and Dutch Clojure Days on May 9. If you’re attending either (or just visiting Amsterdam), drop me a line!
6150