Reading List Archives
I keep track of all the blog posts I have read in 2021.
- Articles Read
- 243
Since 27 December 2020
- This Week
- 20
decreased by-35%
- This Month
- 191
20 January 2021
- TypeScript: Low maintenance types
I write a lot about TypeScript and I enjoy the benefits it gives me in my daily work a lot. But I have a confession to make, I don’t really like writing types or type annotations. I’m really happy that TypeScript can infer so much out of my usage when writing regular JavaScript so I’m not bothered writing anything extra.
- When costs are nonlinear, keep it small.
Jessica Joy Kerr
•
19 Jan 2021
Batching work is more efficient … until cost rises nonlinearly with batch size. Then smaller batches are the most efficient. So don’t delay maintenance!
- Environment variables, config, secrets, and globals
Henrique Vicente
•
16 Jan 2021
Server-side applications are heavily relying on environment variables for holding configuration data, and even credentials like token and password. Is this a good idea?
- How to gather consensus before a big decision
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
The next time you have an important proposal to make, don’t wait until the big meeting to ask for support. Here’s how to gather feedback and build consensus beforehand, so you can make that big meeting into a non-event.
- 3 Reasons You Should Start A Personal Blog in 2021
Jacob Gustin
Us humans tend to place things into narratives, and having a cool blog gives the people around you information about their narrative of you. Having a strong personal brand also makes you more employable and might open doors that you didn’t know existed.
- A solution for social media?
Jan-Lukas Else
•
18 Jan 2021
Sometimes I find it quite interesting to read through articles that I wrote three or four years ago, back then still on the platform Medium. Some time ago I deleted them on Medium and published them on my blog in a “Medium Archive”.
19 January 2021
- From note-taking to note-making
Note-taking is fast, uses the original author’s language, and feels easier. Note-making is slower, more involved, and uses your own language.
- Is Writing as Important as Coding?
Eugene Yan
•
4 Oct 2020
As our careers grow, how does the balance between writing & coding change? Hear from 4 tech leaders.
- Death to covert contracts
“If I do X, then you’ll do Y, even though neither of us have acknowledged it.” This is crap.
- HTML and CSS techniques to reduce your JavaScript
Anthony Ricaud
•
27 Dec 2020
More and more websites are relying on JavaScript for the interactions they provide. It enables pleasant experiences but also comes with undesirable effects: longer page load times, page is unusable until the JavaScript loads and if it does so without any errors...
- I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
TJCX
•
18 Oct 2020
When good ideas make bad business
18 January 2021
- We can do better than Signal
icyphox
•
17 Jan 2021
Centralized silos are never the solution
- Are We Really Engineers?
Hillel Wayne
•
18 Jan 2021
I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.
- That XOR Trick
Florian Hartmann
•
15 Mar 2020
There are a whole bunch of popular interview questions that can be solved in one of two ways: Either using common data structures and algorithms in a sensible manner, or by using some properties of XOR in a seemingly hard to understand way.
- The Embedded YouTube Player Told Me What You Were Watching (and more)
2019, October 11, 00:16: I finish the cold frozen pizza that I made hours before but forgot to eat, finally write the report, press submit on the Google security bug submission form, and see the classic, Thanks! We received your report. message. That feeling is hard to beat.
- Github Stale Bots: A False Economy
Ben Winding
•
18 Jan 2021
Stale Bot’s are a type of automated bot on Github, which locks issues which are “stale” (as in have no recent activity). This seems like a helpful tool at first, but in reality it’s terrible for all parties.
- Build a Simple FLIP Animation in React
Travis Arnold
The FLIP technique allows for declarative and performant animations. In this article, we will look at a simple way to implement this method using React.
- Tidy TypeScript: Name your generics
TypeScript’s generics are arguably one of the most powerful features of the language. They open a door to TypeScript’s own meta-programming language, which allows for a very flexible and dynamic generation of types.
- Consistency beats quality
Do anything consistently for a long time (meaning multiple years), and you’ll be good at it.
- That’s not how 2FA works
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. In the replies, you’ll see lots of techbros saying “this is why you should switch on 2FA people!!!” Except, and I hate to bring accuracy to a technical discussion, that’s not how 2FA works!
17 January 2021
- Becoming a better interviewer
What I’ve learned from studying interviewing principles and analyzing the meta elements of my favorite interviewers.
- My Second Brain - Zettelkasten
For as long as I have been learning web development ( ) I have been taking notes. Partly notes to help clarify my understanding of something…
- A fresh new avenue for Google to kill your SaaS startup
Google Safe Browsing is a Google program that can blacklist any website or SaaS application in Google Chrome and other browsers and platforms.
- How I develop web apps in 2021
Tim Daubenschütz
•
16 Jan 2021
It's now roughly seven or eight years that I'm building dynamic front ends for the web. And since my process of creation has dramatically changed over the years, today, I'd like to share how I'm developing web apps in 2021.
- a11y* is your ally
awesome-badger
I am going to talk about Accessibility for the Web by offering a software engineer perspective (my area of knowledge) of it. However, it is important to highlight that each member of the team could approach this topic from their own discipline.
16 January 2021
- Motivation Will Eventually Go Away: Build Accountability Systems Instead
Motivation eventually goes away. Here is how you can make sure you’ll consistently create the work you’re meant to create.
- Cognitive dissonance is a gift, not a curse
Ben Barbersmith
•
24 Dec 2020
When we feel stressed or guilty because we know we should be acting differently, most of us ignore it and try to turn our minds elsewhere. Instead, we should focus on the dissonance and use it to change our behaviour for the better.
- A Svelte component to format numbers
Instead of 63476432, the component displays 64M.
- How to Kill a Unicorn
Chris Frantz
•
14 Jan 2021
I took a deep dive on freemium pricing and decided to document it in this post. Why freemium? I think it’s how the little guys can win against market leaders. Basically, it’s how you kill a unicorn. Notion, Figma, Canva, Mailchimp, and Segment. What do all of these platforms have in common, besides being category leaders?
- Prove you can write regularly before you think about the tools
Do you actually want to write or do you just to be a person who writes?
- The Big Little Guide to Running Code in the Cloud(s)
There are now many ways to run code, from traditional servers to the new serverless to cutting-edge edge options. This guide evaluates many of the code execution offerings available across AWS, Google, Azure, Heroku, Fly and Cloudflare.
- Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Tom MacWright
It is not just the borrow checker
- Date Manipulation in JavaScript - A Complete Guide
Learn how to work with date and time on plain JavaScript and how date libraries can save you time.
- Dealing with Timezones in javascript
Josh Owens
I often write about Meteor.js specific topics, but today I am going to dive into a more general javascript topic - Timezones. I can already hear most of you, "Just use Moment.js because it makes handling time easy..." I agree, it does! But I am talking more specifically about dealing with timezones and offsets.
15 January 2021
- Our Dumb Security Questionnaire
Hangar Engineering
There are many Dumb Security Questionnaires. This is ours. We think it’s better.
- The Right to Pay for my Products
Paul Heymann
Should we forbid personalised advertisement to gain back our attention, our data, our digital selves? Should we completely break the underlying economic machinery that fuels companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google? I think the answer to that has to be No.
- Cryptography Dispatches: NaCl Is Not a High-Level API
Filippo Valsorda
When talking about high-level application cryptography APIs I usually hear mentioned libsodium, Tink, pyca/cryptography, and NaCl.
- The psychology of influence and hacking growth
Wayne Haber
•
7 Jan 2021
I finished two books recently on the related topics of hacking growth and the psychology of influence. My notes and excerpts are below.
- Don’t worry son, all your friends are weirdos too
Robert Heaton
The morning after the US election it looked like the presidency was still up in the air and the Democrats were going to lose the senate.
- Uganda’s January 13, 2021 Internet Shut Down
Two days ago, through its communications regulator, Uganda’s government ordered the “Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways” hours before the country’s general election. This action was confirmed by several users and journalists who got access to the letter sent to Internet providers.
- How I hijacked the top-level domain of a sovereign state
Fredrik N. Almroth
•
15 Jan 2021
Here’s how I temporariliy took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Encoding data in dubstep drops
Ben Cox
How much effort would it be to actually embed machine readable data inside a dubstep track, while ensuring that the sound could be enjoyed by humans as well…
- Hacking :visited
Hacking the :visited selector to show unread posts. We’ll look at the limitations and my little work-around.
14 January 2021
- We Have A Reality Problem
Christopher Butler
In the early 1990s, when the internet was still in its structural infancy, and its influence on broader culture was widely underestimated if not entirely unknown, Howard Rheingold already knew enough to predict where this newest technology would — and wouldn’t — take us.
- What is Social Cooling?
John Messerly
•
13 Jan 2021
“Like oil leads to global warming … Data leads to social cooling”
- Web Dev Without Tools
Dan Prince
•
4 Jan 2021
Most frontend web development projects rely on a complex stack of tools that turn code into code, or code into errors.
- null
Alan Pope
•
13 Jan 2021
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it.
- Storing Cryptographic Keys in Persistent Browser Storage
Francisco Corella
•
2 Jun 2017
This blog post is a companion to a presentation made at the 2017 International Cryptographic Module Conference and refers to the presentation slides, revised after the conference.
13 January 2021
- An unlikely database migration
Brad Fitzpatrick
•
13 Jan 2021
When I first joined Tailscale, I was horrified to learn that “the database” was a single JSON file that was rewritten on any change. We migrated to something better.
- Legacy Code Should Be Respected, Not Hated
Steven Wade
•
1 Jan 2021
Developers hate legacy code. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, it’s ugly, it’s messy, it’s… old. But we shouldn’t have a negative outlook on legacy or old code. It’s there for a reason, we just need to appreciate that reason.
- 100 daily blog posts
And here’s to thousands more!
- If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room
Live chat is for things that can get lost.
- Exact match domain vs brand domain
Johnathan Nader
I was talking with a friend of mine about the benefit vs drawback of a exact match domain vs a brand domain.
- The Paradox of Abundance
David Perell
•
13 Jan 2021
Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people. Abundance is a paradox. Environments of abundance are bad for the median consumer but extremely good for a small number of conscious ones.
- Get Ready For ESM
At the end of April 2021, Node.js 10 will be end-of-life, which means that package maintainers can target Node.js 12. This Node.js version has full support for JavaScript Modules, also known as ESM.
- Reminder: Please be nice
Adam Piggott
•
12 Jan 2021
I have seen a significant uptick of people posting or joining the forums and using belligerent language, making unilateral demands and insulting the process that is open source software. “The fact you haven’t done x is stupid”. “How can you write a piece of software that doesn’t do y?”.
12 January 2021
- How to Beat Parkinson’s Law
Anthony Diké
•
11 Jan 2021
This is a method I use to help me stop procrastinating on work.
- Laptops need to change
Sergey Grigorchuk
•
7 Dec 2020
They do
- Startup ideas for 2021
Sagiv Ofek
•
11 Jan 2021
Here are some ideas I have for 2021
- The clipboard history feature is the best thing since sliced bread
Martin De Wulf
•
11 Jan 2021
For those who do not know, having a clipboard history is the best thing since sliced bread. It is that little feature that allows you, after you made a few copy actions (ctrl+c on Windows or command-c on Mac), to choose any of the copied texts to paste it.
- Getting started with Signal
First of all you may be asking “who makes Signal?” Signal Messenger LLC. is the company that makes the Signal app. They are funded by the Signal Foundation which is a non-profit organization that relies on your donations to make the app free and not have ulterior motives with your data.
- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About inputmode
The inputmode global attribute provides a hint to browsers for devices with onscreen keyboards to help them decide which keyboard to display when a user has selected any input or textarea element.
- Guest Blog Post: Leaking silhouettes of cross-origin images – Attack & Defense
Aleksejs Popovs
•
11 Jan 2021
This blog post is one of several guest blog posts, where we invite participants of our bug bounty program to write about bugs they’ve reported to us.
- I received first-ever donation on my open-source side project and it felt great!
I decided to build an extension for VSCode. That would add handy buttons for many common commands like save file, format file, show opened files etc.
- Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
Many developers think that having a critical bug in their code is the worse thing that can happen. Well, there is something much worst than that: Having a critical bug in your code and not knowing about it! Using some high school level statistics and a fair knowledge of SQL, I implemented a simple anomaly detection system that works.
- Useful setup that I always use when starting a new project
A bunch of actions you should set when starting a new project that will set you in the right direction.
- Restarting the blog
Returning to proper blogging after two years of it laying dormant. What could possibly go wrong?
- Why using localStorage directly is a bad idea
In my perfect bubble localStorage always works and I can rely on it unless you are using Opera Mini. The reality is a little bit different.
- My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
Carter Sande
I’d be interested in a decentralized social network with network-layer anonymity, grassroots content delivery, and customizable moderation.
11 January 2021
- Let’s Bring Spacer GIFs Back!
The 90s web gave us many delightful things: web rings, guestbooks, “under construction” animations, and spacer GIFs. In this article, we’ll see how I use a Spacer component to solve common layout problems, and why it’s often a great tool for the job in the modern web.
- Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time
Back in December 2019, a few months after I started hacking on Google VRP, I was looking at YouTube. I wanted to find a way to get access to a Private video which I did not own.
- Malware on my Android phone!
Cedric Beust
•
10 Jan 2021
I have a confession to make that I’m not very proud of: recently, I unwittingly installed malware on my Android phone. As one of the early members of the Android team and someone who’s been using Android for about thirteen years, this was a pretty humbling and irritating event.
- GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked)
jayfax
GNOME filepicker and my toilets are broken because of culture of mediocrity.
- The confusing world of USB
Fabien Sanglard
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works.
- I did not notice my worsening mental health, and got hit hard by OCD (a tale of caution)
Sergii Kharagorgiiev
Have you seen “Aviator”, a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio about Howard Hughes? Then you might recall what an OCD is.
- Death to the document
David Yates
•
10 Jan 2021
Until quite recently, the South African Revenue Service’s online tax filing website required Adobe Flash. This aged web plugin allowed SARS to embed editable tax forms in the e-Filing web application. The result looked like this: Taxes and Flash: a match made in Hell.
- 🗳 Ranked voting systems
Elzear
•
10 Jan 2021
How we should change voting systems to remove strategic voting.
- Exploring my writing: The subjects of sentences
Consider the two sentences below, which one do you think is better? "The dog chased the cat." or "The cat was chased by the dog." ?
- Block Cipher Structures: Ranked
An opinionated curation of different classes of block ciphers, ranked by an opinionated furry.
10 January 2021
- Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
- You might not need to store plaintext email addresses
Daniel Skogly
•
1 Nov 2020
Earlier this year, when I went from having only Facebook-login on Wishy.gift to allow registrations with email address and password, one of my concerns was how to implement this is a way that protects the data and privacy of my users. I don’t have any ads or analytics on the site, the users can select whatever display name they want, and I never stored the email addresses I got from Facebook when a user registered or logged in - only a hashed version of the ID. Email addresses and passwords, on the other hand, are a whole other beast, and the consequences of a database breach much worse.
- Software is drowning the world
James Abley
•
9 Jan 2021
One of the many upsides I’ve had from working at lots of organisations is that you get to see what’s common. Are things like this everywhere? Frequently, the answer is yes! An example of this is tech debt. I see organisations which are running to stand still, and I’m not sure they realised they’re doing that.
- Modern codecs like AV1 can bring better quality video to the open web
Judy McConnell
•
11 Jul 2018
Here’s a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That’s because roughly 80% of web videos rely on a patented technology called the H.264 video codec that lets engineers shrink large media files and transmit them quickly over the internet.
- The Platform Is The Enemy
Many, many people do not use the internet, the internet uses them. And this percentage is constantly growing.
- Why you can’t find an engineering coach | Swizec Teller
Swizec Teller
Wanna learn boxing? Join a gym, find a coach. Tennis player with a kink in your game? Find a coach. Software engineer with a missing skill? Google, random blogs, fun newsletters, dubious podcasts, noise on twitter 🤨
- How to grow your email list to three subscribers
Johnathan Nader
Over the past twenty five years as a prolific internet user I have been able to accomplish many feats. Some of which have garnered the attention of governments, others of family members. None of these though are as profound as the truly difficult feat of growing my subscriber list.
- Signal, thank you for not collecting my data. But I won’t use you.
Rukshan
•
8 Jan 2021
Facebook has given an ultimatum for WhatsApp users to either share their data with Facebook or leave the service. And that date is February 8th. One of the most appealing things about WhatsApp is it’s end to end encryption.
- Why you should test critical parts of your app
Last Monday, I sent the usual newsletter to the users of CloudNews. But instead of receiving one unique email, they received dozens of them, some received more than a hundred in a few seconds.
- How WhatsApp convinces you to give it your contacts
Matt Bearman
•
8 Jan 2021
WhatsApp uses dark patterns to coerce you into giving it access to your contacts.
- Block your feeds
I’m addicted to the internet. Mainly via my phone. A year ago I implemented a radical plan to try and stop my addiction.
9 January 2021
- Authenticated Key Exchanges
Soatok
•
22 Apr 2020
Authenticated Key Exchanges are an interesting and important building block in any protocol that aims to allow people to communicate privately over an untrusted medium (i.e. the Internet).
- Steam’s login method is kinda interesting
Owlspace
•
7 Jan 2021
Investigating extra security measures at one of the world’s biggest digital storefronts.
- What I learned doing 125 public talks
Minko Gechev
Over the past 7 years, I gave over 125+ talks for 20 countries in front of over 50,000+ people. By any means, this doesn’t make me an expert in public speaking, but I had the opportunity to learn a few things that I’d love to share.
- What if users brought the infrastructure?
James Salter
•
8 Oct 2020
Maintaining a free cloud app is an unsustainable hassle. Pre-cloud, you could write a piece of software, compile it once for all the systems you wanted to distribute it for, upload the binary somewhere (or send hard copies to people), then go to the beach.
- Processing RSS feeds with Repl.it
Jacob O'Bryant
The other day I made a small web service with Repl.it that does a simple transformation on an RSS feed.
- Next Gen Static Blogging
Maximilian Mackh
Take a look at the source code of this page - I rely mostly on CSS for the rendering of this article.
- Masks Off for TheDonald.win
After all, nothing screams “Proud American” like hosting your website with a French company in a Canadian datacenter.
- Understanding Connections & Pools
What connections are, how they affect our systems, and how and why pooling works—with notes on how popular applications servers and databases handle connections.
- Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design
Dave Akin
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
- Custom Properties as State
Here’s a fun idea from James Stanley: a CSS file (that presumably updates daily) containing CSS custom properties for “seasonal” colors (e.g. spring is greens, fall is oranges). You’d then use the values to theme your site, knowing that those colors change slightly from day to day.
8 January 2021
- The Earth has been spinning faster lately
Bob Yirka
•
7 Jan 2021
Scientists around the world have noted that the Earth has been spinning on its axis faster lately—the fastest ever recorded. Several scientists have spoken to the press about the unusual phenomenon, with some pointing out that this past year saw some of the shortest days ever recorded.
- Why we don’t sell ads
WhatsApp
FB: A reminder that even the best intentions are worthless when selling a security product to a surveillance company.
- Dear freelancer, protect yourself.
Celestine Omin
•
30 May 2020
A few days ago, I wrote a post about how freelancers and clients should manage their relationship and be realistic about expectations. Today, I will talk about things freelancers can do to protect themselves.
- How I automated my Coffee Grinder
Florian Meier
•
6 Jan 2021
Making Coffee and what influences it. There are not many better things than a good espresso to start your day.
- How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance
Evan Ackerman
A week ago, Boston Dynamics posted a video of Atlas, Spot, and Handle dancing to “Do You Love Me.” It was, according to the video description, a way “to celebrate the start of what we hope will be a happier year.” - Featured in IEEE Spectrum.
- Metaballs and Marching Squares
Something about making visually interesting simulations to play with just gets me really excited about programming, particularly when there’s some cool algorithm or bit of math backing it.
- Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World
Joshua Stein
On the modern web, everything must be encrypted. Unencrypted websites are treated as relics of the past with browsers declaring them toxic waste not to be touched (or even looked at) and search engines de-prioritizing their content. While this push for security is good for protecting modern communication, there is a whole web full of information and services that don’t need to be secured and those trying to access them from older vintage computers or even through modern embedded devices are increasingly being left behind.
- WhatsApp? I try to back up my history.
maxwellito
Your whole life in a black box
7 January 2021
- Encrypted Client Hello: the future of ESNI in Firefox
Mozilla Security Blog
•
7 Jan 2021
Background Two years ago, we announced experimental support for the privacy-protecting Encrypted Server Name Indication (ESNI) extension in Firefox Nightly. The Server Name Indication (SNI) TLS extension enables server and ...
- My experience posting on "Who Wants to be Hired" thread on Hacker News
Alex D’Angelo
•
3 Jun 2020
I posted info about myself on the June 2020 “Who Wants to be Hired” thread on Hacker News. The thread has lots of posts of people covering a wide variety of technical roles and locations. What would happen if I did it? Who looks at this? This is my anecdotal experience.
- React Server Components
React Server Components aim to enable modern UX with a server-driven mental model. In this post I will share some notes I took while catching up on the latest...
- An Annotated Guide to React Server Components
React Server Components are a nuanced, sweeping addition to React’s existing capabilities. This is my guide.
- Why Goals Don’t Work as We Expect
We relentlessly set goals — weekly, monthly, yearly. We think when there’s a goal, we’re continually moving towards it. The goal resembles a destination, and it seems to us that we’ll be able to get there only if our desire is strong enough. But it’s not the case.
- A developer’s perspective: the problem with screen reader testing
Screen readers are an essential part of using the web for people who are vision impaired, illiterate or have a learning disability. Today’s screen readers traverse web pages and applications and read out user interface elements, content and allow users to navigate and interact with the web.
- The Local Maxima Trap
Dan Reardon
•
4 Jan 2021
Why the golden handcuffs stay locked
- Tell people something new
Tim White
•
1 Jan 2021
A conversational technique I learned recently (not that I think about all the things I say with such intention) is to tell people something they don’t already know.
- No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
Sahil Lavingia
How we work at Gumroad
6 January 2021
- What I Use Now Instead Of Google
Kira McLean
I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but...
- A simple 2 x 2 for choices
Our life is filled with projects. We invest time, effort or money, and perhaps we get a result. It’s useful to have a portfolio of projects, because not all of them are going to work.
- Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
Daniel Lemire
•
6 Jan 2021
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks.
- What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
BTI360 teammate Joel Goldberg recently retired after working in the software industry for over four decades. When he left he shared with our team some of the lessons he learned over his career.
- DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
OpenAI
•
5 Jan 2021
We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
- Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
Bertrand Fan
•
4 Jan 2021
In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card.
- Moral Competence
Evan Conrad
What we were missing, and what many social-good founders are missing, is moral competence. If you want to do good, you actually have to help people.
- Equal pay for equal work
Remote work is on the rise, the economy is on a decline and businesses are re-structuring themselve...
- How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus
Avir Mitra
•
31 Jan 2020
When evolutionary biologists studied the protein involved in fusing placenta cells, it didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked like a virus.
- How startups can avoid flawed decision making
As a startup founder, it's mission critical to know what decisions you should make quickly, and which you should make slowly.
- Obligatory “What I wish I knew about git” post
Peter Whittaker
•
30 Dec 2020
tl;dr: If you think of `git branch` as a verb meaning "diverge from this path, split my tree" and think of the branch name as a label that tracks the most recent commit on this new path, a lot of stuff about git becomes clearer.
- Note to Self - How to Work
ZephyrBlu
•
31 Dec 2020
Re-align with your Goals: Spend some time thinking about what you’re trying to achieve and why to spark that passion again.
- Shallow Git Repositories
Jordan Rose
•
3 Apr 2020
A useful feature that isn’t documented as well as it should be.
5 January 2021
- Convex and Concave Dispositions
Vitalik Butterin
One of the major philosophical differences that I have noticed in how people approach making large-scale decisions in the world is how they approach the age-old tradeoff of compromise versus purity.
- 10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade
Powerful life skills from powerful people that most people don’t know about.
- Don’t complete their thought
Nick Ngorok
•
3 Jan 2021
I’ve recently been thinking about why listening can be very difficult. One aspect that always comes to mind, a practice that is exceptionally
- Load testing is hard, and the tools are... not great. But why?
Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky
If you're building an application that needs to scale—and we all tell ourselves that we are—then at some point you have to figure out if it does or not. This is where load testing comes in: if you want to see whether or not your application can handle scale, "just" generate scale and see if it can handle it!
- You might want to block Pinterest to save your data
Rukshan
•
5 Jan 2021
I guess this is the first blog post of the new year, even though I’m not someone who is keen on celebrating a new year, I sincerely hope every one would have a very bright 2021. Most of you are enjoying unlimited internet at your homes, but sadly I’m coming from a part of the world that charges a
- Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
Surma
•
4 Jan 2021
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
- What I Learnt Reading 80 Articles On Product Validation
I created a site called validationguide.com (using Ghost) to host all this research. Upon researching the topic, I realized something, Almost all product validation methods for successful bootstrapped companies are the same...
- Telegram publishes users’ locations online.
Ahmed's Notes
•
4 Jan 2021
A few years ago, while using the Line app, I noticed a feature called “People nearby.” The feature lets you connect with other Line users wi...
- How I got to the HN front page three times in a row
Francesco Di Lorenzo
In the past month, I managed to get to the Hacker News front page three times in a row.
- Why we gave ourselves 6 months to make our company work
An ultimatum was what we needed to change our paths.
- My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
John DeFeo
•
5 Jan 2027
Google’s December 2020 Core Update drove this website’s traffic to new highs, then it fell to zero.
- How To Make Seamless Patterns
yuanchuan
•
4 Jan 2021
Sometimes, when we make seamless patterns out of several objects, we need to deal with the situations where the objects are on the borders. Usually we create copies of the objects and place them at proper positions to make the tiling work with no seams.
4 January 2021
- Conspiracy theorists mistake guitar pedal diagram for “5G Chip”, alleging it’s in COVID-19 vaccine | MusicTech
The widely circulated image of the chip is a reworked schematic for the Boss Metal Zone pedal. FB: You can't kill the Metal 🤘
- Developing and Maintaining Gratitude
As I reflect back on 2020, a year that was tough on human civilisation as a whole, I am nevertheless grateful for the many positive experiences of this year.
- Stats are the new analytics
tl;dr: I set up self-hosted Plausible Analytics on this site. You can see it here [https://stats.mattfarrugia.com/share/Be4n5ONmXZa3C495vFOJ2]. This site runs on an instance of Ghost [https://ghost.org…
- Software Leviathans
nsledgianowski
•
3 Jan 2021
- The mathematics of human thought
Keith Devlin
The story of George Boole, father of the Boolean logic.
- Fair-Code Automation with n8n.io
David Field
•
4 Jan 2021
One of the features I really like is the integration with Rocket Chat and Zapier. While it works really well, its also very expensive (at time of writing) from the free tier to the next one up.
- Get a repo-scoped GitHub Access Token quickly
Today I need an access token for github so that I could commit show transcripts for Syntax via some automated scripts. Has three options…
- Parity Purchasing Power
For the last ~5 years I’ve been offering PPP discounts on my web development courses for developers in countries where their purchasing…
- Shiv - Let’s Build a Version Control System!
Shatterealm
Say you have some source code you'd like to track the changes of, but for some reason, you're banned from using any binary not already on the system, and the only binary available to you is busybox.
- Look Up Unknown Phone Numbers using Facebook Reset Password or WhatsApp
This tutorial is meant to help find clues as to who is calling you when you’re receiving calls from an unknown phone number. FB: side effects of mass data gathering from Facebook
- Code Age vs Time to Recall
Tim White
•
1 Jan 2021
A colleague of mine has repeatedly called for some of the controllers in our project to be refactored. He says they’re messy, but what I think he means is that they’re hard to understand.
- Looks vs Results
Greg Kogan
•
30 Dec 2020
Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast.
3 January 2021
- Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond
Vitalik Buterin
- How your startup can survive technical debt
How can a startup use technical debt to survive and thrive? Technical debt is hard to avoid completely but startups can use it to their advantage.
- How we compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money
Lawrence Jones
•
29 Dec 2020
Compression is a trick that can be used to solve a load of problems. Outside of well known use cases, there are a variety of opportunities to improve efficiency or save money by leveraging compression. This post covers one such opportunity, where a tiny change allowed us to save >$30k per year in in…
- What’s good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it's backend inefficient, but it's actually a nice feature from a consumer's perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.
- My year in data
samplesize.one
•
1 Jan 2021
What do I actually do with my time? How productive am I? I logged everything I did in 2020 and got some pretty cool data out of this.
- Castlevania III Password Algorithm
Meatfighter
•
1 Jan 2021
This article explains the mechanism Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse uses to save and restore game state through the medium of passwords.
- How to Stop Endless Discussions
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don’t know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
- I don’t let design and UX get in the way of shipping early and often
Sam Texas
•
2 Jan 2021
I don’t let design/UX influence the early stages of product development. Instead I rely on opinionated frameworks like Django and Bootstrap to take that burden.
- URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
Luke Miles
This Christmas, a family member sent me a URL to a family Zoom call. However, they didn’t send me a direct link to Zoom.
- Encrypted Backup Shootout
acha.ninja
- The design flaws of password managers
Go350
•
3 Jan 2021
I once worked in highly regulated environments and needed a way to recall dozens of complex passwords that changed frequently. I tried to use a password manager, but could not due to the burdens and insecurity of some common design flaws.
- CVE Stuffing
Jerry Gamblin
•
17 Dec 2020
As Michael Roytman told me, “The only thing worse than no data is bad data”, and that is what is happening here; the CVE database is being stuffed with bad data.
- Setting up personal OKR
My approach to creating OKR for the personal life. In this article, I’ve tried covering different aspects of the personal life and created specific and measurable goals for them.
- Curved Text Along a Path
Geoff Graham
•
1 Jan 2020
We can flow text along a curved line with three tools built right into SVG.
2 January 2021
- Shooting High-Res Thermal Photos of Iceland to Show Nature at Work
A computer vision engineer by day and photographer by night, I never take the path most traveled, especially when it comes to imaging technology. Thermal
- The Last Question
Isaac Asimov
- Platforms, bundling and kill zones
Benedict Evans
•
21 Dec 2020
What does it mean when Google, Microsoft or Apple turn your whole company into a feature? When do we let a tech giant build and when do we call the anti-trust lawyers? And what does that mean for Spotify, Yelp or printing in landscape?
- Perihelion and the Seasons
Today the Earth is at the point on its orbit at which it is at its closest to the Sun, i.e. at its perihelion.
- Search with typo tolerance
Surprise your users with a typo-tolerant search. Let them know that you care about them and you’ll try to do your best to show some results.
- Reducing Eye Strain
Jersey Fonseca
- Full-Text Search Battle: PostgreSQL vs Elasticsearch
2020-09-08 update : Use one GIN index instead of two, websearch_to_tsquery , add LIMIT , and store TSVECTOR as separate column. More…
- Stop writing shell scripts
UNIX shell isn’t a real programming language, so stop using like one!
1 January 2021
- Year(Decade) of the Homelab.
Mahdi Yusuf
•
1 Jan 2021
You can find audio to this post here. I’m usually not huge on sticking flag poles in the ground regarding the direction technology will take in the coming years/decades. You can already see me hedging by saying decades in the title. I believe home labs (servers for home use) will become a thing this…
- No Prize for Doing It the Hard Way (2020 Retrospective)
The struggles, failures, and financial realities of bootstrapping an indie software business in 2020.
- Rebuilding my website with NextJS, Chakra UI and Airtable
Thoughts about my new website setup
- 2020 in review
Looking back on 2020 and setting goals for the next year.
- A survey of security.txt
Go350
•
1 Jan 2021
I was curious to know how many popular websites have already uploaded a security.txt file and how many followed the most recent draft. So, I wrote a small Go program to check the Alexa Top 1 million websites.
- One Year of Excalidraw
The Excalidraw Team
It’s been kind of a different year, but it was the first year and pretty amazing for Excalidraw.
- Bitcoin is a disaster.
Ray Dillinger
It is my opinion that Bitcoin is a failure. Worse than that, it's a disaster. It doesn't scale, except by becoming the very thing it was supposed to replace.
- Talk Less, Listen More - The Reformed Broker
Joshua M Brown
•
30 Dec 2020
I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...
- The Big Little Guide to Message Queues
A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today.
- The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators
Thea Flowers
•
31 Dec 2020
A comprehensive deep dive into the design of Roland’s legendary DCO
- 2020 Year in Review
Jack Ellis
•
23 Dec 2020
Here’s my first ever year in review. It’s a deep dive into how 2020 was for me and it wasn’t easy to write.
- Leading someone with more years of experience than my age
Daniel Rojas
•
27 Dec 2020
It all started at my first job. I’ve been around 6 months in the company and was happy getting used to the ropes of my current job. In those 6 months, I quickly pushed to prod (without even k…
- Building a successful company is fucking hard
Navigating my first 10 years of full-time entrepreneurship from dozens in failures to millions in revenue.
- The Urgent vs. the Important
Preslav Rachev
•
29 Dec 2020
I have recently bought an e-book by a Gumroad author [https://gumroad.com/dellannaluca] named Luca Dellana [https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca]. I have to admit I did it mainly to see how successful authors on Gumroad package their offerings. I was initially skeptical about the book, dismissing it as …
- Banking on Status
Julian Lehr
•
12 Dec 2020
How Neobanks Should Monetize Status Signaling.
31 December 2020
- The cost and value of knowledge
Nicolas Fränkel
•
2 Dec 2012
I was a student in France when I discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web. At that time, I didn’t realize the value of the thing, even though I taught myself HTML from what was available at the time (even if I don’t remember the sites - they probably have disappeared into Limbo). When I began …
- There Will Always Be Uncertainty
Anthony Diké
•
30 Dec 2020
A big reason why people are afraid to start is because they’re unsure of what will happen. There will always be uncertainty. The trick is to dive in and reduce the uncertainty yourself.
- How we built the GitHub globe
Tobias Ahlin
•
21 Dec 2020
GitHub is where the world builds software. More than 56 million developers around the world build and work together on GitHub. With our new homepage, we wanted to show how open source development transcends the...
- Well, Actually. 10 Physics Answers.
Sabine Hossenfelder
•
30 Dec 2020
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
- 5 Ways You’re Not Making Your Website Accessible
Twan Mulder
It doesn’t have to be that way!
- Browser Tracking
Madaidan
•
25 Sep 2020
- Linux Hardening Guide
Madaidan
•
25 Dec 2020
Linux is not a secure operating system. However, there are steps you can take to improve it. This guide aims to explain how to harden Linux as much as possible for security and privacy.
- Don’t use Protobuf for Telemetry
Richard Startin
•
29 Dec 2020
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Pro…
- How I Made $40,000 Off A Book…Before I Even Published It.
Emma Bostian
•
10 May 2020
In 30 days I managed to pay of $30,000 in medical debt I have had hanging over me for five years. Here’s how I did it.
30 December 2020
- Things I Learnt in 2020
Vadim Drobinin
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
- How They Shot the Impossible Mirror Scene in ‘Contact’
Meg Shields
•
2 Aug 2020
Mirror, mirror on the wall what’s the most mind-boggling blue screen effect of them all? We explore one of the coolest shots in Contact.
- 3 tribes of programming
Joseph Gentle
•
18 Jun 2017
There’s an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says “Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn’t it?”.
- Getting Started With Webmention and NextJS
Monica Powell
•
3 Oct 2020
An overview of setting up Webmention on a NextJS site to collect comments from across the decentralized social web (i.e., Twitter, GitHub, Pinterest, Reddit) in a centralized place.
- Jumping Into Webmentions With NextJS (or Not) | CSS-Tricks
Atila Fassina
•
3 Jun 2020
Webmention is a W3C recommendation last published on January 12, 2017. And what exactly is a Webmention? It’s described as… a simple way to notify any URL
- Use Old School State
Kyle Shevlin
Let’s kick it old school and create a custom React hook that takes a callback second argument for `setState`.
- Encapsulation
Kyle Shevlin
Typically, functions are written for their reuseability, but I want to convince you that the reason to reach for a function is to encapsulate a concern.
- Paranoid password printing with a Raspberry Pi
7402
•
29 Dec 2020
- Web design that focusses on text content is the best
Mark Smith
•
24 Dec 2020
The modern web is full to the brim with consent forms, paywalls and popups, and in this new world, web design that focusses on text, simplicity and the reading experience is becoming my favourite hidden pleasure.
- Building websites and workflows
Mark Smith
•
29 Dec 2020
There are a lot of futuristic technologies about these days, I realised today that what I like is building websites and workflows
- Failure Is Not An Option
Joe Williams
- Facebook’s Unknowable Megascale
John Griber
•
29 Dec 2020
A mere “website” — say, Wikipedia — that reaches an audience of billions is like the surface of an ocean: enormously expansive, but visible. Facebook is like the *volume* of an ocean: not merely massive, but unknowable.
29 December 2020
- Having fun with Insertable Streams and E2EE (and SFrame!)
Lorenzo Miniero
•
28 May 2020
About a month ago, we shared a post on several things that were happening in Janus. One of the most exciting sections was definitely the one related to end-to-end encryption, and how Insertable
- So You Want to Build an End-to-End Encrypted Web App
Deirdre Connolly
•
3 Jun 2020
The software security model of the web does not lend itself to long term identities, but are they necessary?
- Going Bark: A Furry’s Guide to End-to-End Encryption
Soatok
•
5 Dec 2020
Governments are back on their anti-encryption bullshit again. Between the U.S. Senate’s “EARN IT” Act, the E.U.’s slew of anti-encryption proposals, and Australia’s ne…
- Hacker News Alternative UIs
luke.lol
•
28 Dec 2020
News.YCombinator.com Readers Ranked by Alexa popularity. hn.algolia.com HackerNews with a search function and 16.8+ million posts indexed. Alexa: 8.7k popurls.com Several news sites combined into a single newspaper-like feed Alexa: 87k upstract.com News aggregator with paid features, includes HN Ale…
- Betting With Time
Tom Hirst
I realised control over my time the day I graduated from University in Sheffield, UK, 2009. Or so I thought. “I can’t work for a boss” was my only criterion…
- Does iOS 14 protect your privacy? - Gingerlime
Yoav Aner
•
23 Nov 2020
A few months ago I wrote a post: Does Apple care about your privacy? In the post, I looked at Apple’s IDFA – ID For Advertising, and how it’s abused by companies like Facebook and many more to track you. I believed then, and still believe now, that what Apple is doing is not ethical…
- SVG Favicons and Dark Mode
Dave Letorey
•
19 Nov 2020
Tutorial on how to use Dark Mode with SVG Favicons
- Conditional React Hooks
Ben Ilegbodu
•
27 Dec 2020
How to conditionally call a React Hook while still calling Hooks at the top level
- node.example.com is an IP address
Reilly Tucker Siemens
•
28 Dec 2020
URLs are hard. This year I'd like to examine the most peculiar bug I encountered at work.
- What Is the Jamstack in 2021?
Brian Rinaldi
•
28 Dec 2020
What Jamstack means is evolving. While labels don’t help you get your work done, they are also important.
- Build your own async primitive
Lars from Tweede Golf
Concurrency isn't easy and implementing its primitives is even harder. I found myself in need of some no-std, no-alloc Rust async concurrency primitives and decided to write some.
- Accessible SVG Icons | CSS-Tricks
Chris Coyier
•
28 Dec 2020
The answer to “What is the most accessible HTML for an SVG icon?” isn’t one-size-fits all, because what an icon needs to do on a website varies.
- Experimenting On My Hearing Loss
paddlesteamer
•
28 Dec 2020
var loadAudios = function() { WaveSurfer.create({ container: ‘#generated’, mediaControls: true, backend: ‘MediaElement’, waveColor: ‘#fff’, height: 64
28 December 2020
- Accurate Estimations
Cam Hashemi
•
28 Dec 2020
We’re constantly asked to give estimates: How long will it take?How much will it cost?What time should we leave?How much do you want? Estimations are information about the unknown. We constan…
- Why the iPhone Timer App displays a Fake Time
Lukas Hermann
•
22 Dec 2020
While building a timer app I came across a peculiarity with displaying time and found out that the iPhone timer addresses it by showing you a fake time.
- 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications
Guillermo Rauch
- 2020, the year of the interactive blog post
John Otander
- Build your own React
Rodrigo Pombo
We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the…
- Thinking in React Hooks
Amelia Wattenberger
React introduced hooks one year ago, and they've been a game-changer for a lot of developers. There are tons of how-to introduction resources out there, but I want to talk about the fundamental mindset change when switching from React class components to function components + hooks.
- Building SVG Icons with React
Brent Jackson
How to Create Mathematically-Generated Graphics Using JavaScript and React
27 December 2020
- It’s Hard to Forego Efficiency
Guillermo Rauch
We live in a world of tradeoffs. Spending some time optimizing a certain function takes your focus and time away from optimizing another.
- How Complex Systems Fail
Richard I. Cook, MD
Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety
- API pagination design
Alexander Solovyov
•
15 Oct 2020
Returning all results for a given query could be a challenge for an API, especially if there are thousands of results. It puts a load on a server, on a [...]
- Dark Patterns - Types of Dark Pattern
Harry Brignull
Dark Patterns have been categorised into 12 main types, including ‘bait and switch’, ‘roach motel’ and ‘privacy zuckering’. All of them are manipulative techniques that aim to trick the user into doing something they didn’t intend.
- After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the “Trough of Sorrow”
11 Sep 2012
The life of a startup A few years back at a YCombinator dinner, Paul Graham and the other partners drew a great diagram depicting the life of a new product. The main discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173261. It captures a viscerally truthful thing about the life of a new compan…
- 100 Tips for a Better Life - LessWrong
Ideopunk
•
26 Dec 2020
(Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in. Possessions 1 .If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google <product> reddit. You’ll get real people a…
- Reasons You Aren’t Updating Your Personal Site
Brian Lovin
•
21 Dec 2020
Tips and strategies to painlessly manage a personal website.
- What’s the point of free if you have nothing to sell
Jakob Greenfeld
•
20 Dec 2020
Two days ago Corey Haines shared the following framework.
- The Modern Trap of Feeling Obligated to Turn Hobbies Into Hustles
Molly Conway
•
18 Feb 2019
Not everyone is required to take the things they love and monetize them, transforming them from private passions to unwanted hustles.
- My stack will outlive yours
Steren Giannini
My stack requires no maintenance, has perfect Lighthouse scores, will never have any security vulnerability, is based on open standards, is portable, has an instant dev loop, has no build step and… will outlive any other stack.
- Trading time for money - Nicolas Bouliane
Nicolas Bouliane
•
24 Dec 2020
Paying someone else to do your work isn’t such a great deal, and you should probably learn to do it yourself.