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Tripling Down Against USA Conference Hosting
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,938 posts.
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Don't bother creating a mobile app
Lessons learned spending one year creating and improving our mobile app.
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Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness
One of my recent hobby projects was a blocks-based tool for doing basic data science , and I was very pleased when its test suite reached 100% line coverage. However, Inozemtseva2014 found that code coverage is a poor predictor of how effective a test suite is at detecting bugs once the size of the test suite is…
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The lost ways of programming: Commodore 64 BASIC (2020)
How we interact with programming environment matters more than the language, but such interaction has never been widely studied. Inspired by the idea of 'complementary science', this essay recovers interesting ideas from how programming used to be done using Commodore 64 BASIC. Reading about interactions is not enough…
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Free Your Android
After all the recent NSA revelations, it's been even more important to use Free Software on our mobile phones. Let me express this in another way: We should be very careful about what software we use on a device that is always on and in our pocket 24h a day. Starting from the very basic thing tha...
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Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
A look at the built-in computer use tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash.
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Don't be that open-source user, don't be me
Before I was a maintainer of open source software I was a user of open source software, and I sometimes behaved badly.
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"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home
The infrastructure underlying AS54316 -- the network supporting the services offered by the AP Foundation -- has historically been based out of a datacenter in NYC (NetActuate in Telehouse Chelsea). To add some resiliency, I thought it'd be interesting -- and a potentially fun challenge -- to leverage some spare real…
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Java on Truffle – Going Fully Metacircular
Up until now, GraalVM has offered two ways to run Java programs: using the Java HotSpot VM with the GraalVM JIT (just-in-time) compiler…
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I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly…
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Readme Driven Development
I hear a lot of talk these days about TDD and BDD and Extreme Programming and SCRUM and stand up meetings and all kinds of methodologies and techniques for developing better software, but it’s all irrelevant unless the software we’re building meets the needs of those that are using it. Let me put that another way. A…
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The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel
The unbundling of Excel is just as important as the unbundling of Craigslist. Here's what you need to know about the Excel Economy and how SaaS companies can take advantage of different verticals and use cases that Excel has dominated.
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The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder
A few years ago I met a guy, let’s call him Jim, who was trying to break in tech by going to a bootcamp to become a developer. In the meantime, he worked as a bartender and had been living off the support of his girlfriend, who was from a well-off family and Jim was her trophy boyfriend. He approached me because he…
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Go ahead, write the “stupid” code
When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TAFE (this is like a trade school in Australia, though…
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Cloudflare keeps sending emails over a year after account was cancelled
It has been over a year since I cancelled my Cloudflare account. They keep emailing me and haven't taken me off their marketing lists despite repeated requests. Their CTO told me he would investigate, but nothing changed. Their Data Protection Office hasn't respond to my requests. Cloudflare do not appear to respect…
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Algebraic Data Types: Things I wish someone had explained about FP
Algebraic data types and algebraic data structures sound similar. It’s like they ought to be the same thing. But they’re not. They both have ‘algebraic’ in the name, so it’s confusing. I got them mixed up at times. Others have too. But, they’re different concepts. Understanding the difference will help if you’re…
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Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snapshots
In this article, I present the Linux file system NILFS and its automatic continuous snapshoting system.
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Ten years of JSON Web Token and preparing for the future
Ten years ago this week, in May 2015, the JSON Web Token (JWT) became RFC 7519 . This was the culmination of a 4.5 year journey to create a simple JSON-based security token format and underlying JSON-based cryptographic standards. The full set of RFCs published together was:
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Betting on the Web – Why I Build PWAs
Note: I just spoke at Coldfront 2017 about why I’m such a big proponent of the Web. What follows is essentially that talk as a blog post (I’ll add a link to the video once it is published).
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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
The Greek researcher and storyteller Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fifth century BCE) was the world's first historian. In The Histories , he describes the expansion of the Achaemenid empire under its kings Cyrus the Great , Cambyses and Darius I the Great , culminating in king Xerxes ' expedition in 480 BCE against the…
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Logical fallacies in software engineering
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
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The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound
Researchers discover how accurately the human ear can detect time delay in sounds in different frequencies.
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The science of Westworld
How close are we to building the hosts?
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Faster Ruby: Thoughts from the outside
(This is Part II of the Faster Ruby posts, which started with a retrospective on Ruby+OMR, a Ruby JIT compiler I worked on five years ago )
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How to make quitting your addiction easier
There is one thing most people miss when they try to overcome their addiction. And they make it much more difficult for themselves.
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Rust and C++ Interoperability in Chrome
Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/ Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.
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KeePassXC 2.7.0
KeePassXC Password Manager
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