PG and Jessica
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or...
Facebook: Free as in Bullshit
This whole ad reads more like an ad *for* Apple’s privacy initiatives than against.
NAT Slipstreaming
exploit NAT/firewalls to access TCP/UDP services bound to any system behind victim's NAT
Rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
Over the last 5 years of bootstrapping, I’ve tried a lot of things, and discovered there are many ways to create hassle for yourself that wastes time and energy and distracts you from building value in your business. This is my second post on lessons learned from bootstrapping; you can subscribe to updates to this…
Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
A horror story.
The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers
The personal site of Chris Hacken — entrepreneur and operator who founded and sold Loop Internet. Essays and a podcast on building internet infrastructure, companies, and other hard things.
Why Google Did Android
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it , and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my…
An Intuition for Lisp Syntax
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
On Coding, Ego and Attention
My thoughts on coding, ego and attention. How I learned to get out of my own way by learning about this link between ego and attention.
Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski /…
Maps.me is gone, and we must bring it back
TL;DR: MAPS.ME got bought by a payments company and completely rewritten, I want it back. I will rebuild the original app and bring it back. Sign up for this email list to get the original version back. Or subscribe to this Telegram channel. On December 20th, 2020, version 2.0 of the MAPS.ME app got pushed to the…
Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason
UPDATE June 18, 2020 at 10:24 PM EST: I have made contact with a human at Apple after they reached to me via Resolution Center. We are working on solving the issues, and while I have not been told “yes, your account will not be terminated”, I believe in good faith we will work something out. Yes, the issue was my…
72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
Welcome Hacker News readers!• Thank you to M. Hammad Mazhar for his research that inspired this guide.• @healyio made some great additional suggestions in th...
Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data
Reading a book on a Kindle sends Amazon a lot of data about reading habits. How fast pages are turned, font sizes and views, and device details.
'Ugh fields', or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
Free Textbooks from Springer, Categorised
Springer was very generous with free access to their material for some months, but this period has unfortunately passed. You can no longer access the following books for free, but you can still support them by purchasing the ones you find useful. 🙏😇
Debt is coming to the tech industry
Ten years from now, what seismic change will we reflect back on and think, “well that was pretty obvious, in retrospect”? Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry. We can hat…
Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of computing hardware to adapt it to different problems. This was soon followed by…
So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
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…
Project Svalbard, Have I Been Pwned and its ongoing independence
This is going to be a lengthy blog post so let me use this opening paragraph as a summary of where Project Svalbard is at: Have I Been Pwned is no longer being sold and I will continue running it independently. After 11 months of a very intensive process culminating
The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters