Something to think about: What does the Y in YCombinator stand for?
Things I've saved off the internet
A supposed early warning system that triggers based on the number of private planes currently in flight. The idea is that all those with access to jets would take off immediately but this idea falls apart a bit when you think about response times for say; nuclear weapons attacks.
A tool for introspecting prompts used for Claude Code and seeing what changes are introduced by Anthropic over time. It appears to have died recently due to the migration of the Claude Code binary from bundled JS to a native binary.
A JSON API for surfacing browser fingerprints based on various factors such as TLS ciphers.
A SaaS Platform that was used by one vendor in order to identify North Korean IT workers posting as American-based employees.
A Google SRE talk on why heroism is bad, and something that actively sabotages the performance of a team, despite how it can feel in the moment. In particular, it talks about the virtue of letting systems fail if they are not properly staffed.
Google's ad portal that shows which advertisements are currently being run by various entities.
The Facebook Ad Library shows all active political advertisements currently running on Facebook. It can show various other interesting facts like what nationality the administrators of a given page are ie; for determining influence campaigns.
An online museum cataloguing thousands of various Chinese cigarette brands, with a strong visual aesthetic.
The Department of Internal Affairs is legally required to publish and maintain a Directory of Official Information, which can be a useful proxy for finding out which government agencies exist across the board.
A wiki dedicated to the American Freedom of Information Act. While not relevant for myself, it might contain some inspiration that can translate across to New Zealand's Official Information Act.
This website lets you flip through YouTube as if it were a series of TV channels. Great to stick on a spare monitor to discover new interests.
A tool that allows you to input a URL and query for archived copies across multiple archival providers. Much faster than doing it by hand.
A manual curated index of newspaper clippings that talk about the Official Information Act.
A fairly extensive bibliography containing material that talks about the Official Information Act itself, as well as where it can be strengthened.
The National Security Archive, run by George Washington University, contains a vast collection of unclassified documents that give hints to how US policy was shaped over time.
A completely over-engineered dashboard that supposedly lets you track world events as if you were in a movie.
In addition to Oral Questions, there is a database of Written Questions that MPs have filed to be answered. It can be quite a useful source of information.
A UK company that famously made a SQL injection as a company name, only to have their company name banned by the Companies House.
A special index that is useful for tracking the strength of solar storms.
An extensive library of screenshots covering every major release of macOS right back to the beginning.
An absurdly long variable name that represents a contact’s mother’s sibling’s daughter or father’s sister’s daughter.
As it says on the tin, this is an API for converting HTML into PNGs. It's probably great for rendering professional screenshots.
This file contains a hardcoded list of every single carrier supported by Android devices.
The PS1 is very well documented when it comes to the architecture of the system and this website goes to great length to document a lot of the various control signals emitted by the console.
A collection of tools used for ripping audio streams from videogames, almost all created by the same user.
The handbook that new ministers in the New Zealand Government receive when being inducted into their role.
A PDF copy of the deskfile that gets provided to Ministerial Advisors by the Department of Internal Affairs upon appointment.
A third-party tool for importing metadata into Musicbrainz from various providers such as Spotify, Bandcamp, Tidal and others.
A public database, curated by the Responsible AI Collaborative, which seeks to catalogue various incidents that are considered to have been related to AI in some way.
A "godzilla" cryptography tutorial from the infamous Peter Gutmann based here in New Zealand.
Habeas was a company from the 90s that would license haikus to companies. Those companies would embed said haikus in their email headers and then whenever an unlicensed spammer would clone their haiku header, Habeas would sue them for copyright infringement.
A bizarre story from 1999 where a Dutch airline shredded 400 squirrels because the sender refused to receive them and there was no other viable alternative deemed possible.
A tool for breaking down Postgres explain plans in order to make them more parseable for humans.
A tool from Datadog that takes metadata about third party requests from across their userbase and aggregates them all into provider-specific status pages.
A searchable list that contains every possible UUID. You can even mark your favourites!
A locally-hosted web server that can ingest exports from various websites and render them all as one big timeline. Partly notable due to being created by mholt of Caddy fame.
An index containing all of the side material for Chaos;Child, a well-received entry in the Science Adventure franchise.
A post from way back in 1996 lamenting that there wasn't a universally adopted binary format for logging. Fast forward almost 30 years later and nothing has changed.
This tool fetches the CloudFormation resource spec from each Region and compares them, allowing you to see differences in service parity. It also compares the APIs, EC2 Instance Types and RDS/Aurora database engines that are available in the two selected Regions.
A Windows application for testing the latency experienced by other applications
A handy reference site containing end of life calendar dates for a whole variety of services. Handy for automated checks that tell you when to bump some versions.
A handy tool for exploring OCI container metadata and files
A dedicated site from AWS detailing their take on the best practices to follow when it comes to implementing Observability
A guide to various patterns that help with composing internal API surfaces for frontend app usage. There are many different ways to slice the problem.
A list of the top 1 million domains as queried against Cisco's umbrella network.
An interactive list containing all of the known Unreal Engine 4 console variables, along with a brief description of what each of them do. Handy for debugging or just messing around.
A client-side tool for generating flamegraphs from HAR files. It's handy for identifying bottlenecks by analyzing request timings.
A reference guide for developers wanting to use Ubuntu as their daily driver. The "Toolchain availability" is most useful, showing which versions of popular language toolchains ship with each version of Ubuntu.
A tool from Canonical for finding AWS AMIs relating to each version of Ubuntu. Quicker than having to search through the AWS Console for official public images.
A short story about an AI and how it replaces middle management, rather than the stereotype of replacing low wage work. The idea is that strategy is automatable while physical labour is less so.
A tutorial on Jujutsu, a Git-compatible VCS which can be used as an interface on top of Git. This Gitbook is a sizable introduction written by Steve Klabnick of Rust fame.
A React library for building interactive node-based editors which can be useful for exposing complex configuration to regular users.
A comprehensive guide on how to build Kuberenetes operators, which can automatically manage and heal elements of a cluster.
A story from the early days of Apple where some managers naively tried to use lines of code added as a measure of productivity. They quickly stopped when reports of negative lines added rolled in.
This page is the entrypoint for the RetroAchievements Junior Developer program. Personally, I could be interested to add a set or two for some niche titles but there's quite a bit of skillset involved to really start contributing. Even if you're not interested in achievements, it's probably a handy list to browse.
Pikuma has quite a few different game courses but this one on MIPS Assembly programming for the PlayStation is quite interesting I think. It's a full end-to-end course that personally I would find interesting just to understand in depth how the original PlayStation functioned.
An interesting historical artifact from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. This particular item was an attempt at sending mail via cruise missile. Unfortunately it didn't really seem to catch on.
It's a guide where, well, you get the idea. You make a database from scratch in Go. There's not much else to be said.
A combination of macOS and iOS apps that play music. Nothing fancy but intended for those who like to haul around music tracks on disk. I'm not there yet myself but eventually I might be.
A fairly simple macOS app that does what it says on the tin. It lets you edit metadata for music files. Handy if you like to curate your own library by hand.
An old-school webpage that talks about how Pseudo 3D in videogames worked. While I don't have the skill set to make use of it personally, it'd be an interesting thing to browse sometime.
This archive contains a whole bunch of cyberpunk inspired art by the artist known as ANTIREAL, who was recently given a spotlight unfortunately due to Bungie having quite literally copypasted their work into their currently unreleased game Marathon.
This law style guide outlines the format for writing a piece of legislation in New Zealand. It isn't personally useful for me but it does provide some insight to a curiosity that I've had around how people "know" how to write this stuff.
The comprehensive rulebook for how Parliament operates in New Zealand. It has been compiled over many years based on observed practices.
An open source intelligence platform that is used by journalists and non-profits (among other industries) to look up individuals and entities. Used in a recent 404 Media investigation if I remember correctly.
A minimal site that points out a handful of HTML meta tags that are no longer necessary in the present.
An angular-based webapp that makes it easy to edit subtitles and view the results in real time.
An experimental dashboard for viewing Fitbit data. Bizarrely, the official Fitbit app does not support adding steps. It supports adding distance and will infer steps but that's it. This used to be a feature in the old Fitbit dashboard so in a pinch, this unofficial site supports adding by steps.
The Auckland Forecasting Centre is a joint partnership between Auckland Council, NZ Transport Agency and Auckland Transport that provides supporting evidence for infrastructure and mobility decisions, usually in the form of transport and traffic models.
An algorithm that is able to generate a small blurred image, containing the colour palette for a given image. The representation is only 20 - 30 characters long, making it great for serving during app initialisation.
An art project where machine learning would be applied to the livestream of Flemish Parliament in Belgium. It would detect each politician and draw bounding boxes around any cellphones that they were using.
An absurd mailing list thread from 1997 with posters making fun of the Sony Playstation. Some things never change over time, like trolling.
David Mazières and Eddie Kohler submitted this joke paper to International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology after being continually spammed by that journal. Even funnier, the journal automatically accepted the paper instead of reading it properly.
A transcript of a committee hearing with Stephanie McMahon. It's somewhat funny as she refers to Randy Orton and Batista as handsome while referring to CM Punk as being not particularly good looking.
An open-source specification for describing cloud costs in a standardised format. It means that tools only have to support one format that can be used across all cloud providers. Whether it is adopted by other tool providers remains to be seen.
A site for receiving and debugging webhooks, although it can handle any general HTTP requests. A lightweight replacement for requestbin which became bloated after being acquired by Pipedream.
The NZISM is a big document that outlines all of the Information Security considerations for various government departments. You'll find things like the various threats posed by the use of Bluetooth devices. Given it is authored by the GCSB, it presumably contains useful hints about attack vectors that aren't likely to be used on the average citizen.
Pico CSS is a lightweight CSS framework that is designed to provide great accessibility and styling out of the box for plain HTML elements. Ideally, you don't need to write any CSS at all.
An insanely responsible visualization of every known book. It won first place in an Anna's Archive content to see who could do the most impressive visualization of the known ISBN space.
A group of fans dedicated to reverse engineering their favourite videogames. At the time of writing, projects consist of a wide range of Pokemon games across various Nintendo platforms.
Two professors at the University of Washington spent 8 months developing a course on large language models, aimed at college freshmen. It's designed to teach everything they should know, and be wary of, as much as that's possible given the rapid rate of change happening currently.
A helpful utility site that helps the user craft AWS IAM policies. Trying to remember all of the actions and ARN formats is a complete nightmare so this makes the job much easier.
This exhibit is part of the Eisenhower virtual museum and it details his cigarette lighter. The page claims that he drank an insane 24 cups of coffee a day, on top of 6 packs of cigarettes and 2 hours of sleep per night.
A directory containing a number of PDFs, all of which detail the design of The Sims. These seemingly live on the personal website of Don Hopkins who did a lot of the core programming.
A database containing all known variations of every game console that exists. Sorting by rarity results in some interesting units that I've never heard of, and I like to think I know a thing or two!
A handy tool that continually makes requests to one of Google's static domains. As you move around, you may be able to increases (or decreases) in latency. It's handy for debugging connection quality but only one measure in an ocean of variables mind you.
A relatively hidden page on the orange website that contains a curated list of interesting comments. If only there were an RSS feed for it, that would be quite nice.
A tool designed for visually mapping out people, systems and other entities that have relationships. This can be a great help for investigations that quickly become hard to reason about.
The ICD-11 is essentially a giant index containing the various health issues that can afflict a person. Particularly interesting is that a bunch of the codes can also be used to codify causes of death, if someone wanted to ask their local governmental health organisation about a certain category of death.
A tool for comparing the cost and compute of EC2 instances. Amazon is generally not super transparent about all of the details so this third party tool is handy as the next best thing.
The United States National Archives has a Citizen Archivist program where citizens (and possibly even non-citizens) can work to flesh out information about the archive collection. A useful side quest for anyone who wants something meaningful to do.
A handy website for trying to find font stacks that work with modern browsers. Surprisingly, even "common" fonts like Arial are not guaranteed to be available on all modern operating systems.
When the iPhone first launched, Nokia quickly put together this internal presentation about where they saw the market going and their need to react. They were mostly right but as we know, it didn't save them unfortunately.
A custom Google Map by YouTube user Rambalac, who records scenic walks around Japan with no commentary. This map outlines all of the trains walked by Rambalac which is handy if you want to see a particular area of Japan.
A DIY kit for adding USB-C and Bluetooth support to the iPod Classic. A neat way to keep an older, perfectly good piece of hardware compatible with existing technology trends.
An unclassified memo, triggered in part by artist Trevor Paglen, telling National Reconnaissance Office employees to be careful with patch designs. The patches in question are often attached to uniforms and the designs of the logos may accidentally embed hints about still classified programs.
A credits page for an ancient fan dub called "This Is Otakudom". Keen eyed readers might notice that Terence Tao, winner of the Fields Medal aka the highest award in Mathematics, features in the middle of the page.
An interesting, very short finding from the New Zealand Ombudsman that found tweets are technically a valid way to file an official information act. Any medium is valid, as long as the request is explicitly stated as being an OIA request.
This blog post details one of CodePen's funding round. Of particular note is that Tim Sabat, one of the cofounders, is brothers with Chris Sabat. If that name sounds familiar, he's the English voice actor for Vegeta, Piccolo and many other Dragonball Z characters. He's also a steward of the series at this point as well.
An online manifesto advocating for adopting a permissionless lifestyle. Particularly, it outlines that a density of policies stiffle innovation so readers should ask for forgiveness instead of permission in order to progress society forward.
A group of dedicated ISS program employees are trying to build a miniature ISS that rotates its solar arrays and other panels to match the position of the ISS in real time. As a side effect, they revived an unloved livestream of ISS telemetry for the public to observe.
A database that tracks indicators of inequality across the board, split up by country. It's really just what it says on the tin.
This website sells courses for learning music theory but more interesting than that is the landing page. It's interactive and a perfect example of how to explain to your audience what your product provides. A lot of websites are bizarrely bad at doing this.
A comprehensive list of tools covering all of the various areas that may need consideration when launching a startup.
A website in the vein of Reddit, where users post perceived gaps that could be addressed by a new startup.
PKL Lang is a configuration language from Apple that can compile to JSON, YAML and even plist. It's quite young but seems like a promising entrant that combines the benefits of other config languages.
TLOxp is a tool that aggregates information about people from various sources such as credit report headers. A 404 Media investigation found that underground criminals often use TLOxp, by way of stolen credentials, to look up their targets. It was recently used to look up the details of Luigi Mangione and his family.
Baumol's cost disease basically states that all wages rise equally due to productivity gains in other sectors. This means that for certain sectors, wages increase but their productivity stays stagnant, forcing prices to increase.
Pruneyard v. Robins was a Supreme court case that found that because California law has an affirmative view on free speech, it was constitutional for a group of high schoolers to peacefully exercise free speech within a shopping mall despite it being private property. This case has been cited in arguments around whether public platforms such as Twitter can be considered town squares that should stay uncensored despite being privately owned.
A comprehensive fan site mapping out arcades around the globe. Not only locations but also the particular machines they have as well.
An interview with Mike Yeagley of PlanetRisk. It's mostly interesting as Mike, who was featured heavily in Byron Tau's Means of Control, talks openly about tracking individuals by way of data collected by ad brokers.
A post from Reddit user /u/biotinylated who posted about Theranos, way back in 2012 before it was public what was going on. A fascinating reminder that whistleblowers may be blowing their whistles actively, it's just that no one is seconding it.
An exhaustive guide to everything you would probably ever want to know about the Curl command line program. What more is there to say?
Documents requested from the NSA via the US Freedom of Information Act show a handful of complaints about the quality of the food in the cafeteria.
A post that breaks down all of the various parts of Apache Kafka through the lens of the videogame Factorio. Even if you don't play Factorio, it's a pretty good way to reason about Kafka.
A registered nonprofit that seeks to promote RSS usage by way of providing feeds for popular services that don't provide them. Users can donate to request a feed be created for a service of their choice.
A map showing various geological landmarks around New Zealand that you might like to visit sometime. Each landmark has a ranking as well as an accessibility score.
Another project from Riley Walz that scrapes fast food prices, via mobile APIs, and maps out which states in the US have the highest prices for the same items.
A project from Riley Walz who hid an Android phone in the Mission, running Shazam 24/7. It seems to have stopped sending data at the time of writing but it's still a neat idea.
Matchstiq's panel regularly curates a list of the Top 50 startups in New Zealand that are considered the most interesting places to work at. They aren't necessarily the strongest picks but more of a snapshot of the industry.
A screencasting course by Aaron Francis, perhaps best known for creating the highly polished MySQL for Developers course over at Planetscale.
A wiki containing most things you might ever want to know about modifying your ONT. Doing so is not recommended but it makes for an interesting educational resource.
As it says on the tin, a guide to using SQLite for high performance operations, taught via a high quality video course.
The financial messaging standard used for EFTPOS and it's also what Visa and Mastercard's proprietary standards are based off of as well. This wiki entry breaks down parts of the spec. Being an ISO standard, the actual spec would cost you 96 CHF to purchase.
When lobbyist's lobby in America, they have to disclose their efforts. You can browse these disclosures on the Senate website.
Migaku is a browser extension and app combo that integrates (unofficialy) with Netflix in order to learn languages through your favourite shows. I have no idea if it's any good, it just seems like a novel concept.
Louis "Studs" Terkel spent his life doing many things but is best known for preserving oral histories by interviewing many peoples, some famous and some not. Upon his death, most of his works were published as an online archive that spans all sorts of genres and personalities.
A project of the UK charity Global Change Data Lab, Our World in Data is a non-profit that publishes datasets about the big problems in the world such as poverty, hunger, war and others.
A seemingly complete list of all TOR nodes that exist, which is updated periodically. This can be useful to infer whether traffic coming from an IP may be malicious, using TOR as a cloak. Of course, not all TOR traffic is strictly bad!
One of a bunch of tools provided by c99, this subdomain finder does what it says on the tin. If you give it a domain, it'll find other known subdomains. Presumably in part by reading certificate transparency logs.
A writeup from Wikipedia user Guy Macon about how Wikipedia consistently raises ever increasing amounts of money each year with no end in sight.
A Chrome extension from Bellingcat that surfaces the original filenames for images uploaded to Google Maps. It can be useful for OSINT investigations such as determining when a photo was originally taken.
A tool hosted by NOC that can be used to see if your domain name is blacklisted by known DNS operators. It's possible if a domain was previously used for questionable content.
Translated as "Cognitive Focus Theory", it essentially states that your amount of luck is a function of how widely you think. Being selfish reduces your luck while thinking about the rest of the world increases it.
Natural Earth is a public domain set of mapping information at different scales. Most useful is probably the county borders dataset, available as polygons which can be used for interactive mapping projects.
The World Bank Group hosts a bunch of data sets relating to global development such as nutritional intake per country.
Back in 2010, it was unveiled that the 33rd largest supercomputer was actually a cluster of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles run by the US Air Force Research Laboratory. It was also supposedly the fastest interactive computer accessible by the US Department of Defense.
A web-based rule validation tool created by Apple. It's purpose is to help generate tags that nudge password managers into generating passwords that suit your system ie; if you don't support symbols or passwords longer than 16 characters.
WiGLE is a map showing WiFi networks and bluetooth devices all around the globe. It's populated by volunteers uploading the results of their scans.
A piece of software that can apparently find issues in scientific papers. It was used in at least one Science investigation to find large instances of image reuse, as well as doctored graphs in the backcatalogue of one particular researcher.
Part 2 of David Allen walking through his GTD setup.
An extremely well hidden gem of a video featuring David Allen, of GTD fame, who walks through his personal filing system. It's a rare glimpse into how the creator of GTD himself runs his own system.
A collection of tools compiled by Bellingcat that are handy to know about when it comes to performing open source investigations.
A website useful for saving video and audio from a large number of social networking sites such as Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and more.
A channel attributed to David Boothroyd who appears to have uploaded ~1000 videos covers almost all corners of British politics over the last few decades.
A great post from Cedric Chin of Commoncog who analysed a number of business cases and essentially found no patterns between them in terms of success. His advice for anyone interested in discovering business ideas is to optimise for low-stakes tinkering.
Breezewiki is a passthrough proxy for Fandom sites, which are infested with advertisements nowadays. Personally, I have Kagi (a search engine) rewrite search results to pass through Breezewiki and it's great! Especially for devices where using an ad blocker is less than straightforward such as Safari for iOS.
A somewhat famous video, often shared in language learning communities, showing a talk by Stephen Krashen. He talks about how immersion is really the number one thing in language learning, as it mimics how children learn.
A gamified platform that allegedly makes it faster to learn Maths compared to a traditional class using an expert system that structures courses to best suit each student.
Milan Cvitkovic presents a list of numbers related to neurotechnology that are worth keeping handy for reference. It's probably useful to review if you're practicing for a quiz night as well.
Given height, length and angle of a shadow, as well as a timestamp, this shadow finder can surface all of the possible points on earth where this shadow could occur. It's a Python library presented for public use via a Google Colab noteboook.
Kismet is a multi-purpose capture tool that can sniff WiFi, Bluetooth and RF signals among other things. Useful for analysing your environment to see what interesting things are around.
An extremely minimalist website that scrapes popular news websites and presents today's headlines in plain text.
GPS Jam is a map that aggregates data from planes by their navigational quality. It turns out that where the data shows planes flying with degraded navigational systems, you're likely to find GPS jammers such as within warzones.
A website dedicated to the craft of creating movie titles.
A large scale dataset used for training machine learning models to recognise timeseries patterns.
A new, relatively pleasant UI framework created by WorkOS. I might use it for a project sometime.
FIRMS is a system that produces data about active fires around the globe, with near-real time results in North America and around 3 hours of delay worldwide. It can be useful to overlay with other data sets to see where fires may have broken out in facilities.
A completely wacky study that requested source excel files from a great number of journals, only to find that about 20% of them were unreadable out of the box due to errors where Excel had parsed gene names as dates.
A completely nutty discussion between Jon Stewart and US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. The confusion of the Secretary as to why Jon is so hung up on the DoD being unable to pass an audit, and account for the billions of dollars it spends annually, is fascinating to watch.
A pretty alarming study that found microplastics in every human testicle that was in the study. A previous study found microplastics in every human placenta that it studies too. Scary stuff.
An extremely bad prediction on the part of the New York Times who predicted that it would take 10 million years to develop the first plane. A few months after publishing, the Wright Brothers came along.
A report on live in Kabul after the Taliban succeeded. It's darkly comedic given some of the various fighters are now doing "normal" jobs like traffic management which they find very boring.
A fascinating dataset that shows that across all countries, people have a tendency to rate themselves perfectly satisfied yet at the same time assume their country is highly dissatisfied. It goes some way to explaining how things can objectively good yet everyone has a negative outlook.
A memo written by David Mamet and given to the writing staff of his show The Unit. The general gist is that he implores his team to always have a reason for every scene to be occurring with "providing information" not being a valid reason in his view.
A fascinating deep dive by Bellingcat into how they unmasked Denis Sergeev as one of the perpetrators behind the 2018 poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
A single-serving site that outlines the numerous inventions that were pioneered by women. It's many more things than someone unfamiliar might expect, given how male dominated these industries now tend to be.
An absurd New York Times article about the outsourcing of prayers from the US to India. It's a funny example of what frugality might look like when taken to its logical extreme.
A classic thought experiment in the form of a fictional short story. It introduces the idea of a "basilisk" which is an image crafted such that it crashes the human brain.
A 2024 court case that determined manipulating a suspect's finger to unlock their phone is constitutional. The general gist is that it's not unlike taking fingerprints for use as evidence.
A comprehensive summary of the book The Trial, itself an analysis of a merger court hearing. In short, book publishers are in the hits business, relying on one breakout star while 99% of books funded barely sell any copies at all.
A deep dive (no pun intended) into the undersea cables that power the internet, as well as the obscure crews that do repair jobs to keep our society running.
A wild article about the CEO of Swedish firm Hexagon, who conducted a financial earnings call while under arrest. Those attending the call had no idea that police were in the room with the CEO as he conducted the call.
A framework for reasoning about documentation. It splits things into four categories that each cover a different type of learning. The idea is that different categories meet people at different levels of experience.
The Number Administration Deed (NAD) is the authority that administers phone number blocks within New Zealand. It can be useful to see what region a given phone number is tied to, if any.
An upcoming REST client that tries to cover the same feature set as Postman (and Insomnia) while striving to be Git friendly.
A site that aggregates various bits of media and surfaces how tough they would be to read through, given how proficient you are in Japanese.
This site proposes the idea that a lot of notable events all happened in 1971. Why that might be, and whether it's just a coincidence, is left up to the reader.
An interesting tool that lets you determine domains associated with Azure Active Directory through a public query.
A neat digital dashboard that is probably better suited to the entrance way of a corporate building but it would be fun to have as a hub in any given house. A bit overkill perhaps.
As it suggests on the tin, this is the official place to learn about how much the United States is spending and on what.
A timeless comment by tangerine, a user on Metafilter, describing the idea of "Ask vs Guess culture". It's the sort of framework where it seems completely obvious in hindsight yet is never explicitly communicated in most groups.
A fascinating deep dive by the author into debugging DNS resolving done by the Spotify client on macOS. A great primer on the lower levels of the macOS networking stack.
A useful tool that tests out various methods of serving ads and checks to see how many of them are blocked by your ad blocker.
An interesting, if not scary tool that fingerprints your browser and checks to see how unique it is compared to previous visits of the site.
Nathan Peck, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, provides an overview on the various factors that you should and shouldn’t take into account when designing a good scaling policy.
A morbidly fascinating paper on home food preparation businesses and the contaminations that can arise from them. It contains some really great imagery.
Beej is back with another comprehensive, yet accessible guide. This time it’s about IPC. Not much else to say really!
The San Francisco Maritime National Park Association hosts a bunch of navy documents. Among them are apparently some very accessible guides on electronics.
Matt Webb’s side project categorising each episode of In Our Time by where it would fall within the dewey decimal system. It can be a good jumping off point to learn about topics given how many episodes have been released over the years.
A macOS tool for deep-linking files as text. I’ve heard a lot about it over the years but personally haven’t tried it.
A graph visualisation platform. As far as I know, it’s the tool responsible for a bunch of interesting graphs like “The Internet Visualised”. They usually appear in tech publications with little background information.
An ongoing attempt to require NZ companies to disclose their "beneficial ownership". In other words, who ultimately controls any given company regardless of any shell companies that may exist in between.
A handy tool that translates CURL commands into various other programming languages.
Normally macOS recommendations for remapping keys lead to third-party software. This single serving site generates a plist which will let you do rebinding at an OS level.
A single-serving site that helps you generate fake JSON data. The structure can be entirely arbitrary and there are plenty of helper functions for generating data types like addresses and phone numbers.
A set of troubleshooting scenarios where real, ephemeral Linux servers are spun up in broken states. Your challenge is to figure out what is wrong with them and bring them back to life. Unix kata in other words.
Samal writes about the slow decline of Mapbox after it was acquired. It's the usual story but captured pretty concisely.
A comprehensive guide that, as it says on the tin, helps you learn Go through the use of writing tests. Even if you know Go, it can be useful to see how you might approach testing certain bits of logic like reading files for example.
A deep dive into the guts of the Python import system. If you've used Python for any amount of time, this should help to dispel a few myths and clarify how it all wires up.
An extremely verbose name for a Java class. I'm not really sure what else needs to be said.
A tour of the basic "security" elements which any fresh start startup should invest in to make their lives easier when applying for SOC2 down the line. The reality is that some amount of it is theatre for auditors who are non-technical but some of it is good practice generally.
The author takes a very detailed look at their past stint as a sex worker. There are plenty of graphs and other analysis on various details of the profession.
In this excerpt from Communications of the ACM Vol. 13 No. 6 from June 1970, the author outlines what we now know as the relational database model for storing data.
A good crash course in how to wire up alerts for SLOs, such that they don't erroneously page engineers. The included illustrations also give a good idea of how to reason about SLOs for newcomers.
An utterly bizarre story about Jerome Kerviel, convicted for doing rogue trades while at Societe Generale. His response was to embark on a 900 mile pilgrimage as a stand against "the tyranny of the markets"
Multiple tips from Anthony Bourdain including his infamous "Nerd fury" recommendation. When looking for the best of anything, you can get there quicker by provoking those who are very pedantic on message boards.
A job listing appears for a job with Amazon that says "join us in reinventing database systems for my butt!". It seems the author had the "Cloud to Butt" Chrome extension enabled.
A relatively user-friendly introduction that still manages to stay RFC compliant. It does a pretty good job on presenting things in simple language.
A catalogue of various articles and resources related to aviation operations and safety. It contains a bunch of incident investigations.
A rant that was accidentally made public, outlining the organisational differences between Google and Amazon. In particular, Amazon's investment in making everything a service and how that gives them the upper leg in the cloud fight against Google.
Mark E. Haase conducts a lot of research to answer this seemingly simple question. Interestingly, a lot of developers were in favour of support but the discussion was closed. Simply put, no one pushed on.
Chris Siebenmann on how a number of Unix tropes make perfect sense logically. In fact, they could be considered robot logic because they're not helpful to any actual human who makes mistakes often.
Tom MacWright on his increasing skepticism of Single Page Applications in general. He points out that the most high performing parts of MapboxGL and Observable are vanilla Javascript.
A childrens storybook that explains the premise of Apache Kafka using Otters. It really is a book that children could read while still explaining the concepts nicely!
In short, what percentage of operating costs for public transport must be covered by passenger fees. Perhaps of note is that Japan, who have nice trains, also have a very high recovery ratio.
Exactly what it says on the tin, it's a handy utility for finding brand colours.
An explainer about the difference in how traditional companies view software engineers compared to Silicon Valley. It boils down to freedom and respect really.
A model for thinking about configuration and the cycle that it seems to take. In short, hardcoded values are increasingly abstracted until a worse clone of the original configuration is invented.
A post about the usefulness of Gemini's uselessness. Personally I'm indifferent to Gemini but this post contains an interesting excerpt from the book "How to Do Nothing" that is worth a read.
An archive via from Bell Labs explaining the nature of the UNIX Operating System. Brian Kernighan provides a demo of pipelining in simple, accessible language that helps it all click conceptually.
Bryan Cantrill, of DTrace fame, once posted an infamous reply to comp.sys.sun.hardware back in 1996 and it has continued to haunt him ever since.
A handy toolkit for testing various SSL issues and encryption ciphers. Primarily useful for checking that bad configurations are properly detected when building software that performs HTTP requests.
Ken Thompson's infamous lecture that was presented in response to winning the ACM award in 1984. Ken plays out a "What if" scenario where the C compiler is altered to inject trojans into otherwise normal code.
As it says on the tin, a quick refresher on every new feature that has been added to Javascript (ES6) in the last 10 years. Even if you've been following along, it's a handy reminder.
A now deleted entry in Gamer Escape's Loremonger series for Final Fantasy 14 that serves as a transcript and summary of the findings of the gigantic CG Midlander thread.
An almost 1000 page epic detailing the journey taken by the protagonists of the original Final Fantasy 14 CGI trailers.
Martin Keary a.k.a Tantacrul provides a masterclass on how to respond to a community with clear, simple and approachable language. For context, having only just started his role, it's not his mess he is cleaning up.
Geoff Huston writes about one of the hidden battlegrounds of the internet: transport encryption. Plenty of software relies on being able to inspect packets they shouldn't otherwise be concerned with.
An early interview with Steven Blum, who is a prolific voice actor particularlly in the games industry. He makes a brief allusion to Season 3 of Digimon likely going over the heads of the target audience.
A 2001 interview with Jeff Nimoy, director of the majority of Digimon Adventure and Adventure 02. Jeff and his business partner Bob Buchholz were responsible for the highly underrated English dub script.
A blog post detailing the data model behind Notion, as it says on the tin. Something I've been curious about for a while since from the outside, it can feel quite cludgy.
A Hacker News thread recounting the (brief) history of Prometheus and how Borgmon, the project it was reimplementing, has been "deprecated" within Google for quite some years now.
A yearly report issued by the United States Director of National Intelligence. Of note is the section warning that the world remains "vulnerable to [...] large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease".
A study that had 4 military platoons engage in mindfulness training while another 4 acted as a control group. It found that the mindfulness group had faster recovery from stress than the control.
Anton Zhiyanov walks through some of his favourite features of SQLite, that may be lesser known to the audience, such as the ability to import data natively from a CSV or JSON file.
The transcript of a talk from Bert Hubert, cofounder of PowerDNS. It covers outsourcing and how, given enough time, businesses will lose all knowledge of how to make things in their own industry.
A lengthy blog post, completed with interactive 3D models and animated diagrams, showing how an internal combustion engine works. A masterpiece of teaching, using the web.
A PDF manual walking through the logistics of replacing billboards with art or satirical posters.
A handy tool for scaffolding out a README for those who are particularly new to open source and don't have a template ready to go (like me).
A report analysing the responses to an online survey run by the CDC. Bizarrely, 19% of respondants claimed to have washed fruit, vegetables or other foods with bleach to deter COVID-19.
Chris Schulz explores the seemingly abandoned SkyWorld Entertainment Centre in Auckland and starts to investigate what happened in later entries of this series.
Craig Hockenberry recounts the history of the word "tweet" and how it came about during the development of Twitterrific
An email from the co-author of RFC 1918 explaining that 10/8 was the range for ARPANET at the time. It was freshly disabled so Jon Postel suggested reusing it as the private address space we know today.
An extremely comprehensive wiki entry on how to explore and extract file formats, such as dumped videogame ROMs.
A timeless reminder that you're not ahead or behind of anyone, especially not hypothetical, flawless versions of yourself
A glossary of words that Google has opinions on how they should be presented, if at all. Useful to learn terms that you might not be familiar with, or to get inspiration on how to present UI elements.
A name of the concept where, if you think too much about an action you're performing, you start to forget how to do it and things fall apart.
In which it is revealed that the concept of a "carbon footprint" is actually the result of a marketing campaign funded by BP. Individual footprints pale in comparison to industry.
Lyft debuts Lyft Shuttle, a service where a shuttle travels along predetermined routes during commuter hours, at a fixed rate. Definitely not a bus!
A maintainer on the netdev Kernel mailing list announces their withdrawal. Their employer, IBM, states that they are not allowed to contribute outside of work hours.
Ezra Stevens writes about the creative accounting employed by Amazon, when claiming that they have created billions of dollars of value out of thin air.
A 2011 article from The Mary Sue chronicling how OKCupid's values seemed to change conveniently, as soon as they were acquired by Match.com.
A really interesting search engine, whose quirk is that it removes popular results.
Zach Tellman on being stuck in an industry that conflates business problems with technical ones.
A somewhat infamous comment from Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, stating her belief that executive compensation is actually 75 - 80% below what it would be according to the market.
A handy post from Sebastian Jambor about the joys of fzf and how it can make your life easier. It does more than just search files!
An episode of Sway, hosted by Kara Swisher, where she interviews Tim Cook about a number of topics from App Store pricing to why Apple doesn't allow sideloading. A transcript is included.
A handy showcase demoing a number of pre-built Tailwind components that can be used or edited for websites. I actually used some of these for my own site. Source code is licensed under MIT.
An insane ticket that sped up Windows tests on Firefox by simply not writing 50GB (!) of I/O every time. It's always fun seeing such huge payoffs from single line fixes.
The author demonstrates a problem with authoritative sources, in that if they were supplied with false information way back when, the web of references that follow cement it as an unchangeable fact going forward.
The author calls the story of why the prefix for long options was decided to be two dashes rather than some of the other suggested alternatives.
The gist of it is that while small teams may build an understanding of how a piece of software lives, passing that understanding on to another team is essential to keeping it alive and healthy.
A comment from Brendan Eich explaining that if he hadn't built Javascript in the 10 days he had, "something worse" would have taken its place, which is hard to imagine.
A toolkit for inspecting BGP peering and other things. It's handy but I don't really understand most of it yet.
Naoki Yoshida, director of Final Fantasy XIV, outlines the general progression that players are expected to follow in the game. In short, casual players take longer than hardcore players.
Hiroshi Minigawa, UI lead on Final Fantasy XIV, explains the pseudo-random number generator used in the game, and why it can feel unfair to players. In short, logical fallacies.
A roundup of comments by Naoki Yoshida, director of Final Fantasy XIV, explaining the troubles with the games enormous amount of save data and how the developers have trouble expanding some systems.
It turns out that a lot of symbols for genes resembled dates, such as MAR1. This made life annoying for scientists who use Excel so rather than fix Excel, it was easier to just rename the genes...!
The author outlines his personal list of operational footguns when it comes to operating SQL databases at scale.
OKRs tend to focus on leading indicators such as "Complete a 10km marathon" when we're better suited to lagging indicators such as "Go for a run three times a week"
An article from Harvard Business Review giving some insights into how organisations can encourage collaboration that expands across the boundaries of any single silo.
A reminder from the W3 about what constitutes a cool URI. Mainly that the actual hyperlink doesn't change format once you've published it.
Mark Seemann explores the dark side of being "passionate" in the software industry and how it may not always be beneficial in the long run.
Matt Stancliff gives a recount of his time at Pivotal Software. In short, sales and marketing runs the entire place to the point of basically being a scam.
UNESCO has a committee that maintains a list of "cultural practices and expressions" from every country. It's a good way to discover what practices are beloved around the world.
If you stick a list tag within an h3 tag, it doesn't render properly. This has been a bug for over 20 years.
Cal Newport recounts the rise of Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann's 43 Folders and the advent of "productivity porn".
Mike compares Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's strategy to that of Starcraft's Zerg.
A 1988 New York Times article suggesting that drinking a coke in the morning could somehow possibly be healthier than drinking coffee
The author details how you can't really tell people anything if they don't have a mental model to go about understanding the implications and potential benefits of said thing.
A light weight introduction to the concept of VLAN tagging and the tradeoffs between handling tags within software versus hardware.
Opening remarks from Chairman Jay Clayton of the SEC, where he touched on the legality of ICOs for the first time publically.
The story of a Wikipedia administrator who went all out in creating 80,000 boob-related redirects.
A theory that we live in a gift economy, where value is accrued through social status. How do you gain that? By giving away things of value.
Coda Hale giving a talk on the value of metrics from first principles.
OVH announced that there is a degradation in performance followed by an announcement that the entire building is on fire
HN user intrepidhero on the idea that most developers love to program and don't care about the problem they're claiming to be solving.
A mobile application in India suddenly starts making 90 million requests per day for a specific image of a flower. The team tracks down the source with very little information to go off.
A science fiction short story from Ted Chiang. It's about a device called the predictor and how if we ever realised free will doesn't exist, we'd probably lose our drive to do anything.
A series of blog posts that recount and analyse stories of failed enterprise software projects. They're collated by Henrico Dolfing, a consultant for troubled software projects.
An epic rant, in the form of a code comment, about how the Adobe PSD format is awful.
An excerpt from Skin in the Game, a book by Nassim Taleb. It covers the power of the minority to force change where the wider majority is entirely indifferent. The result is that the most picky (or intolerant) group ends up being catered for widely.
Camillo Visini on how you might go about structuring a FastAPI application to ensure each module is nicely separated from the rest.
A tongue-in-cheek request to have Gentoo users labelled as such when opening IRC so that the user can automatically block them.
A Mapbox tutorial for showing changes on a map over time. I used it to build my proof of concept Parnell parking heatmap.
Benjamin Reinhardt shares his tips on networking for the less adept.
A Facebook blog post that details their use of Erlang to power Facebook Chat. They've probably moved on but it's validation that Erlang seems to scale nicely for certain needs.
Venkatesh Rao's series of posts on how The Office perfectly encapsulates organsational power dynamics
The Grugq talks about how propaganda is no longer "opaque" as its effect online can be measured in near real time, unlike with physical propaganda.
Kevin Kwok on the future of collaboration. Namely, Slack should only get more and more redundant as it becomes friction in between apps where work is actually done.
Dr. Sean Brady on the perils of expertise. He recounts the fire of Mann Gulch which claimed all but those would could drop their mental tools.
Coda Hale on an epic semi-rant about how the only feasible way to scale a business, is through force multipliers
HN user Pandabob describes the differing influencer tiers, where surprisingly bigger isn't always best
apenwarr on the actual role that executives play within a company
HN user motohagiography points out that those without a degree can not be seen to uphold cognitive dissonance as they have to rely on skills and performance (ie competence) rather than credibility.
Hugo Landau on the intended use cases for XML, which is a document markup language and not a data storage format
A Tumblr user attempts to recreate source code shown in the original Digimon series
The way to scale in the presence of errors is automated recovery... or burnout
Ian Miell on his learnings from managing Site Reliability teams, and for maintaining documentation
A very colourful glitch art hoodie created by Dataerase
A website that lets you listen to live air traffic controller feeds
Gergely Orosz on the power of writing engineering proposals
Anne-Laure Le Cunff on how to be more intentional with your time, rather than succumbing to the fear of missing out
Various members of the Titanfall 2 team talk about the infrastructure powering the game
Gergely Orosz believes that the ability to write prose is an undervalued superpower for engineers
A style of writing that can aid not only in editing, but also comprehension for the reader
Alex Nixon on how writing not only informs others, but creates a clearer understanding for the author when forced to convey their ideas as a compelling narrative
A comprehensive roundup of every tech-related social issue that affected San Francisco in the last decade
Jeremiah Lee, lead Web API developer for Fitbit, talks about why you should consider JSON as your default choice rather than eg; GraphQL
A great Hacker News thread detailing the various architectures used by different AAA games
Blizzard adds buffer overflow emulation to StarCraft: Remastered, in order to support old custom maps
A random pattern is generated based on keyboard input
Alan emphasises that the design of messaging between objects is much more important than objects, and their contents themselves.
Alan explains his thought process what OOP means to him, with the core tenant being a focus on messaging.
A programming font designed with code and retina displays in mind
A site for test driving different programming fonts. It lets you paste code snippets and see how they render, with the appropriate syntax highlighting.
A real time log analyzer that runs in the terminal
A repository of over 2 million curated, royalty-free icons
A memo sent from Dave Goldberg to Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton. It was released as part of the Sony hack.
David Perell lists the best things he discovered in 2019
A dataset containing emails from (mostly) senior management at Enron. Initially released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it was later cleaned up and released for public consumption
A behind the scenes feature post on the creation of the default wallpaper shipped with Windows 10
A joint report from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England on the importance of service reliability within the financial sector.
Craig Larman and Victor R. Basili on the long history of software development practices
Andreas Zwinkau details the mistunderstood history of waterfall. It was meant to be a two part process but the DoD only took the first part.
An issue of Red Herring Magazine from June 1998. It predicted that "the Internet's impact on the economy [will have] been no greater than the fax machine's."
Rob Pike tells the history of dotfiles, and the can of worms opened by their flawed implementation
Lorelei Lee's epic on the the war against sex work, from all directions
Hiten Shah details the flawed product decisions that reduced Evernote's brand to that of a "failed unicorn"
Jonathan Blow details how software is slowly degrading, as the numerous layers of abstraction cause generations to forget how CPUs work
A suite of software tools released by GCHQ, the primary Intellgience organisation for the UK. Think of them like the NSA of the United Kingdom.
An appeal from Brendan Eich that software publishers should not be inherently trusted, but verified, since they could, at any point, be compromised by governments.
This RFC teaches you what makes a good name for a computer (and also what doesn't make a good name)
The author talks about the importance of keeping a human logbook, to track progress and establish habits
One of the most fascinating talks I have ever watched. Perhaps best taken with a grain of salt, "The Grugq" goes on a whirlwind tour of the three major superpowers and their spying style
A list of phone numbers that Pagerduty will call you from, should you have phone calling enabled as a contact method.
An audio forum tried to determine the speaker setup used by Jerry Seinfeld in, well, Seinfeld.
A behind the scenes look at Slack's newest, and largest refactor, released in 2019
Andy Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, discusses the Making of Crash Bandicoot in this first of a multi-part series
A PEP that discusses Python wheels and the manylinux1 platform tag
The author outlines their alternatives to Gmail, and a few other Google services
Fair, a vehicle subscription app, outlines how they broke up their monolith into microservices
An article exploring how to create something that is better than the price tag of "free"
A humorous excerpt from the fourth Hitchhiker's entry So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish about how society often doesn't use the power they hold
An TCP/IP guide that is designed to be comprehensive whilst still being comprehensible
What's the biggest image, by pixel size, that can be accomplished in the fewest number of bytes?
An article about Uploadcare's stack which includes Python and Django
A user who recommended that a Code of Conduct be added to awesome-django repo, despite no instigating circumstances that required one
An amazing look into the meta of Smash Bros gameplay, and also pretty daunting as far as how in depth it is
A blog post from Intoli about using Scrapy to pull reviews from the Steam store
A bunch of monospaced bitmap fonts suitable for terminal use
A useful little reference site for using strftime in Python programs.
A useless blog post detailing how to reverse engineering a mysterious h.264 encoded MP4.
Dewhurst Security walk through disabling certificate pinning for the Facebook Android and iOS apps.
ProFont is a monospaced, bitmap font.
Brandon Invergo is a believer in using GNU Stow for dotfile management and this is his setup.
This proposal from Khaled Omar outlines IPv10, a successor to IPv6 which would incorporate IPv4.
D. J. Bernstein believes that IPv6 is a complete mess and outlines his reasons why.
A Twitter thread where different game developers chime in with hidden mechanics that aid the player.
It's something that I couldn't really answer and this SQLite clone tutorial seems to remedy that.
Karl Popper puts forward the paradox that if society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will either eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
This PDF details the changes in ES6 and what security folk should know about it.
Habitat was a graphical multi-user dungeon developed by LucasArts. This writeup details what lessons were learnt after release.
It's Raymond Chen's highly acclaimed blog.
Hacker News outline their favourite developer blogs. Useful for when you're craving some RSS content.
Dave Meltzer recommended the match between Fedor Emelianenko and Mirko Cro Cop. I can't remember why though.
Nikita Voloboev outlines his favourite macOS applications.
A 2002 article about the initial launch of FastMail.
A Google tool for viewing how often a word or phrase has appeared in literature over the years.
Russell Keith-Magee recounts his experience setting up his company and the slow decline that lead to it being shut down.
An almost perfect example of how to produce an informative, compelling breakdown on a technical topic.
Laura Sullivan brings a special NPR report investigating the Red Cross failure in handling the cleanup of Haiti.
PRI reports on the result of integrating a leader from the for-profit business world into a charity.
A ProPublica investigation into the Red Cross and their failures handling the aftermath of Superstorm Handy and Hurricane Isaac
A nice beginner starting guide for reverse engineering device firmwares
The community explains how the posters assembly can be slower than that of a higher level language.
An Xposed module for Android that disables SSL pinning for applications.
A blog post detailing how to reverse engineer an API and undo certificate pinning.
An informative guide on how to setup a systemd service that can be applied to anything besides Deluge.
You don't need some crazy big database because you're not Google!
The author lays out why they believe MapReduce isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The story of Bill Gross and his Twitter client buy out.
I mean, it is what it says on the tin.
The author talks about why text is the most stable communication technology.
A site with lots of programming examples to fix.
A list of programming projects that can be implemented in any language.
A list of useful Elixir resources.
A small, fast, modern HTTP server for Erlang.
A VS Code setup recommended by @requisite0.
A framework recommended by @requisite0.
A language that leverages the Erlang VM. Used by iwantmyname and recommended by @requisite0.
A lossless JPEG resizer.
A PNG optimizer that recompresses images to a small size.
Hacker News commenters list books they consider worth checking out.
A look back at mid-2000 era site designs.
Useful for naming projects.
This book will teach how to build macOS and iOS apps.
A book that steps through how to build a Kanban application in React.
A list of common myths in programming.
A guide to using vim and tmux on macOS.
A collection of exercises for learning Python.
Nice looking Python colours.
A useless list of y'know, what the title says.
A great timeline based overview of SSL/TLS's past and future.
A nice looking graphing library.
An useful site for visualising the Javascript event loop.
2D Tetris would be enough I think.
A starting guide to using Three.js.
A searchable database of certificates.
A go-to source for unix jargon
Great for testing purposes.
What better way to learn about programming languages than to make your own?
An interesting breakdown of Google's API responses.
Just use simple words! Silly economists.
Did you know that there is a subset of people who strive to be amputees? This among with other types of disorder that are unknown.
A Knowledge Base of major security issues.
Ever wondered how old that map is?
NeoGAF lists out a bunch of franchises that I may not have heard about. I haven't read the list.
A guide to building various Javascript build environments.
Well, it's worth asking!
A unique form of warfare that some accuse Russia of employing.
A relatively obscure Japanese title that still hasn't received an English patch unfortunately.
A great read exploring the idea of an AI that strives for maximum efficiency.
What would happen if you took Twitter's character limit and applied it to Javascript?
Yup, what it says.
A comprehensive list of database dumps.
An improved resume service I should try out.
A very cute (and cheap) moon shaped lamp.
A Google Drive repository of Retsupurae's popular Dahir Insaat videos.
A compilation tape of four experimental adventures.
Useful to finding out what you don't know that you don't know.
A tool for visualizing cloud architecture layouts.
A program for debugging, dumping and viewing digital stream information sent via satellite, cable or terrestrial.
Pretty much everything you could want to know about operating system development.
Niel Cicierega's wacky photoshop script.
A guide to strengthening Lets Encrypt certificates.
An interesting example model of supply and demand.
Yup, you can do that. Here's a quick overview of the commands.
The author lists their favourite programming books as you might expect.
A list of books that programmers like to throw around but haven't actually read. I should probably read them.
A comprehensive list of audio commentaries usually reserved as special features for DVDs.
Everything you could ever want to know about lasers!
A step by step breakdown that roughly explains how Git works.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
A collection of support tickets from an aggravated helpdesk worker.
No matter where you move your mouse, this site will find it for you.
This site will take you to a randomly chosen useless website.
A guide to CSS where each entry is accompanied by a visual example.
The author explores the various issues that stem from computing.
A step by step guide to writing your first system call for fun!
A thread keeping a comprehensive list of possible practice programs.
An overview of the protocols used for most of the world's telephone networks.
This service lets you check that your email won't be rejected as spam.
Scott Hanselmen talks about the unseen developers who aren't using bleeding edge tools or interesting languages.
The author explores the idea that society is an endless back and forth between both political extremes.
While CSS may not be ideal, we could have had it worse.
A rare look at the behind the scenes of the opening FMV.
A site that uses GIFs and images in an interesting way.
It turns out that /dev/urandom and /dev/random aren't to be treated the same.
Google's guide for designing their own services which they generalised and released to the public.
A live action Japanese adaption of The Drops of God manga.
He's the Dave Meltzer of wine or is Dave the Robert Parker of Wrestling?
A series of open source books detailing elements of Javascript in depth.
An explainer on why Unix systems have directories like /bin and /usr/bin.
The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
Thomas Sowell explores why the same people tend to disagree on a multitude of topics that have no political affiliation.
Inside the lives of staffers in the West Wing of the White House.
A T.V sketch show set in the future looking back over the beginning of the 21st century, between 2005 and 2030.
A classic NPM bug where showing the progress bar would result in performance slowdowns of up to 50%!
As the title suggests, a user breaks down why operations in the famous "wat" video work at all.
A blog featuring very sarcastic weekly roundups of Hacker News content.
A how-to guide on network programming using sockets.
A service from Thomson Reuters that assigns unique IDs to businesses, founders and so on for information processing.
A 184 step guide to building your own text editor in C.
A great resource for possible project names.
A very detailed writeup about using Mutt for macOS.
The author explains how Markov chains work and how they built an automated wine reviewer using it.
The first ever React IDE which looks like Atom and React Dev Tools had a baby.
A cute lightweight tooltip library.
A comprehensive answer regarding the recommended number of iterations to use when encrypting passwords.
A guide to best practices with Javascript compiled from numerous developers and organisations.
A roundup of various design patterns to consider when creating a module or library.
A complete guide to using SSH securely.
The idea that modules shouldn't have to depend on each other but instead on abstractions.
Hacker News commenters weigh in with useful endpoints for getting financial data.
The standard format for storing emails.
Paul Graham examines how PR firms influence news publications, in this case through the seemingly endless return of "suits".
I don't remember why I bookmarked this but it must be pretty good?
Another blog from Kai Hendry with a focus on more technical bits.
Kai Hendry's personal blog.
A philosophical title where the author attempts to identify a relationship between language and reality.
A global news database that would be useful for applying again different sectors like finance to track response from the public to news events.
For those who are looking for a step by step guide to the Go programming language.
An analytics library that can record detailed heatmaps of user sessions.
The author details his time cleaning up code for The Witness and general C++ best practices.
A nice looking theme for use with Ubuntu.
A nice bitmap font that's free to use.
The online version of the Wrestling Observer which is also home to Wrestling Observer radio.
The author explains how to use question based brainstorming to come up with ideas that are more likely to work.
Apparently New Zealand has our own "pro-wrestling news source".
A computational method intended to simulate social behaviour. It has a neat GIF.
Well, it is true after all!
The longest running email system on the internet!
A Hacker News user creates a webhook library only for other commenters to weigh in with their own libraries.
Hacker News commenter davidw explains what he believes to be a misunderstanding of the realities surrounding H1B holders.
Important to know if you're building a compiler, which I'm not.
I always forget how to do this so it's a useful guide to consult.
This site compares the two aforementioned databases. Spoiler: He hates MS SQL.
The author discusses why he believes that Go handles errors better than most other languages.
A Reddit user has compiled a list of essential Tetsuya Naito matches to watch.
A strange thread about Gran Turismo 2 on the GameFAQs forums.
Hacker News commenters discuss the 1939 Worlds Fair and what was left as a result.
Hacker News commenters weigh in with business advice for software developers.
The process of reducing data redundancy and improving integrity. Put simply, making sure your data doesn't become a tangled mess.
The author built a 500 line Git client using Python and explains each step in this post.
It's /that service/ companies use to autocomplete your address when you buy something.
Well, I didn't pay anything but I feel a lot more enlightened on pointers now!
Surprising to find on Github, user zmatilsky901 has constructed a list of recommended Hip Hop songs.
As it says in the title, a quick guide to securing your HTTP headers.
Aaron Bieber's blog. He writes about emacs a lot. In fact, I think every post is about emacs!
My results from the 8values political scale. Apparently I'm closest to being a Social Libertarian.
Looking to get all the trophies for Final Fantasy X-2? This is what you should be checking!
A comprehensive list of Louis Theroux's documentary specials.
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's scale for emotional "liveliness".
Noopkat writes about her development environment on Windows.
A simple chart that maps out Big O in an easy to grasp manner.
An article from Troy Hunt that is exactly what it says on the tin.
A text only copy of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailing the life and death of "computer genius" Phil Katz, pioneer of the zip file.
This post details a number of design decisions to consider when creating a user login.
The "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet Text Messages" now known as email. Section 5.1 shows that "+" is a valid delimiter in an email address.
The author details how to get SSL certificates working with Offlineimap for macOS.
A band that I keep hearing mentioned but know nothing about.
A GNU/Linux port of Little Snitch, a whitelist based firewall.
A minimal, responsive CSS framework.
A story covering the life of a survivor in Haarlem during World War II. The Baudelaires mention it as being their favourite book.
Paul Houle examines the XMP specification used in various applications, such as explorer.exe, and how an Adobe metadata spec can lead to whitespace of at least 20%!
Max Mautner discusses interview tactics with Paul Carleton of Stripe. The transcript is very lengthy.
Juho Snellman's writeup about how slow PS4 downloads can be attributed to a small TCP receive window.
Toggl's backend developer test.
The concept of reasoned discourse and how people perceive it? I'm still hazy on the concept.
A Playstation 1 skateboarding title that apparently has a really good soundtrack.
A post detailing the basics of extracting an APK from an Android device.
The author details how he went about reverse engineering his fitness tracker.
The author of the quote responds to Tim Berners-Lee's comments on net neutrality.
Bunraku Sake that Hulk Hogan was once drinking on Twitter.
A currently existing Mangafox Node library I might try to rewrite in the future.
A Google spreadsheet comparing various authentication techniques for APIs.
A list of lesser known commands for use with NPM.
A book exploring the relationships between reality, symbols and society.
A concept in Japanese aesthetics that focuses on accepting imperfection.
A number of heuristics you should strive for when designing a user interface.
Although it goes without saying, an article explaining why you should never expect a developer to work on your idea for free.
This site explains the history of failed startups and breaks down what went wrong.
You can use dircolors to specify the colour of file extensions in bash.
A group of CSS icons available for reuse.
A series of repeatable SVG patterns available for reuse.
A date time library where the functions are modularised.
An immutable date and time library.
A Javascript utility library for working with native objects.
A password hashing function that I should probably check out.
A Hacker News commenter explaining why our ideas seemingly become more and more simple.
The author details some neat uses for Git.
A quote from Michael Crichton describing how you might read a story, scoff at it and then turn the page only to presume the writer is an expert.
A Github comment in which it is determined that Facebook has no interest in relicensing React.
I discovered Crawl after Crowbcat used the song Toccata.
I particularly like Scuttle Town.
The author explains that a number of unix commands are used in ways that are redundant.
A large list of useful unix commands.
The author's father supposedly predicted a president similar to Donald Trump back in 1985.
An article about how intelligent individuals try to substitute a lack of information with supernatural explanations.
A nice one column Jekyll blog theme.
An article on lessons learnt from software postmortems.
A guide to Unicode in regards to foreign languages.
An article discussing why companies who seemingly progress so little publicly require so many employees.
A novel about a woman who joins an Internet company that starts out great but begins to fall apart.
A Project Itoh novel about a world transformed into a surveillance hell.
The idea that a speaker's world view is influenced by their primary language.
An interesting example of a Jekyll portfolio.
A Gitbook detailing the Linux kernel booting process.
The documentation for the Linux kernel. Well over my head but it should be an interesting read.
Wes Bos's automated font bot. A good example of how to use Twitter's stream functionality.
The user dhouston would go on to make Dropbox as we know it.
A fun site that does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's about the preparation required for conference talks and how they're not so straight forward.