I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
Many websites and applications these days are designed to trick you into doing things that their creators want. Here are some examples from timewellspent.io:
A journey through a trendy hell
This project, the M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine, was on my to-do list for a long time. I finally managed to complete the project after working on it for several months in my free time. The machine uses an Arduino microcontroller, stepper motors, an RGB colour sensor and 3D-printed parts to sort several types of…
The differences between system administrators and software developers as well as why all software developers should have some amount of sysadmin experience.
So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so…
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
Today, we deployed HTTPS by default on Stack Overflow. All traffic is now redirected to https:// and Google links will change over the next few weeks. The ac...
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover.
Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more…
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay …
When building applications that display untrusted content, security designers have a major problem— if an attacker has full control of a block of pixels, he can make those pixels look like anything…
The full code for the completed scraper can be found in the companion repository on github. Introduction I wouldn’t really consider web scraping one of my hobbies or anything but I guess I sort of do a lot of it.
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of…
This year, around February, I started offering telephone support for Taxnote, which I hadn’t done up until then, because the idea made me anxious. I intended to quit if, at any time, I thought it was tough for me to do; but, so far, I have continued with it for over half a year, so
The thought “I know PHP! How hard could running an exchange be?” never goes anywhere good.
tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…
Do you have feedback you'd like to give to Google, Facebook, StackOverflow, Inc., or Gandi? Now there's a website that will collect that feedback. Or... not.
Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text
This Daily Mail piece by David Derbyshire is so profound it has been cited over and over: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations: an interview with four generations of the same family about how far they were allowed to wander as kids. It comes from Britain but will sound familiar to
The current draft of the Senate Tax Reform Bill would tax stock options and RSUs upon vesting. Currently, stock options are taxed upon exercise and RSUs are taxed upon release of the underlying shares. This is a HUGE deal to everyone who works in companies that partially compensate their employees with these two…
