Bookmarks
Things I've saved off the internet
2026
21Apocalypse Early Warning System
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.
cchistory
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.
Security Fingerprinting
A JSON API for surfacing browser fingerprints based on various factors such as TLS ciphers.
OSINT Industries
A SaaS Platform that was used by one vendor in order to identify North Korean IT workers posting as American-based employees.
Why heroism is bad, and what we can do to stop it
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 Ad Transparency
Google's ad portal that shows which advertisements are currently being run by various entities.
Facebook Ad Library
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.
Chinese Cigarette Museum
An online museum cataloguing thousands of various Chinese cigarette brands, with a strong visual aesthetic.
Directory of Official Information
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.
FOIA.Wiki
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.
Channel Surfer
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.
CachedView
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.
Newspaper indexing of Official Information Act (OIA) related archival news clippings
A manual curated index of newspaper clippings that talk about the Official Information Act.
Official Information Act 1982 : A bibliography
A fairly extensive bibliography containing material that talks about the Official Information Act itself, as well as where it can be strengthened.
National Security Archive
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.
World Monitor
A completely over-engineered dashboard that supposedly lets you track world events as if you were in a movie.
Written Questions - New Zealand Parliament
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.
; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";--LTD
A UK company that famously made a SQL injection as a company name, only to have their company name banned by the Companies House.
Nowcast Hp30 & Hp60 Index
A special index that is useful for tracking the strength of solar storms.
macOS Screenshot Library
An extensive library of screenshots covering every major release of macOS right back to the beginning.
CNLabelContactRelationElderCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter | Apple Developer Documentation
An absurdly long variable name that represents a contact’s mother’s sibling’s daughter or father’s sister’s daughter.
2025
78High Performance HTML to PNG API
As it says on the tin, this is an API for converting HTML into PNGs. It's probably great for rendering professional screenshots.
etc/apns-full-conf.xml
This file contains a hardcoded list of every single carrier supported by Android devices.
psx-spx
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.
Stream ripping tools
A collection of tools used for ripping audio streams from videogames, almost all created by the same user.
Induction Handbook for New Ministers - 2023 edition
The handbook that new ministers in the New Zealand Government receive when being inducted into their role.
Ministerial Advisor Deskfile
A PDF copy of the deskfile that gets provided to Ministerial Advisors by the Department of Internal Affairs upon appointment.
Harmony
A third-party tool for importing metadata into Musicbrainz from various providers such as Spotify, Bandcamp, Tidal and others.
AI Incident Database
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.
Encryption and Security Tutorial
A "godzilla" cryptography tutorial from the infamous Peter Gutmann based here in New Zealand.
Habeas Sender Warranted Email
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.
BBC World: Europe - Dutch airline in squirrel shredding row
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.
explain.depesz.com
A tool for breaking down Postgres explain plans in order to make them more parseable for humans.
UpDog
A tool from Datadog that takes metadata about third party requests from across their userbase and aggregates them all into provider-specific status pages.
Every UUID V4
A searchable list that contains every possible UUID. You can even mark your favourites!
Timelinize
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.
Chaos;Child Material
An index containing all of the side material for Chaos;Child, a well-received entry in the Science Adventure franchise.
Standard log file format - binary version?
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.
Region Comparison Tool
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.
LatencyMon
A Windows application for testing the latency experienced by other applications
endoflife.date
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.
Registry Explorer
A handy tool for exploring OCI container metadata and files
AWS Observability Best Practices
A dedicated site from AWS detailing their take on the best practices to follow when it comes to implementing Observability
BFF Patterns
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.
Cisco Popularity List
A list of the top 1 million domains as queried against Cisco's umbrella network.
Unreal Engine 4 Console Variables and Commands
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.
PerfCascade
A client-side tool for generating flamegraphs from HAR files. It's handy for identifying bottlenecks by analyzing request timings.
Ubuntu for Developers
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.
Ubuntu Amazon EC2 AMI Finder
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.
Manna
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.
Introduction - Steve's Jujutsu Tutorial
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.
React Flow
A React library for building interactive node-based editors which can be useful for exposing complex configuration to regular users.
The Kubebuilder Book
A comprehensive guide on how to build Kuberenetes operators, which can automatically manage and heal elements of a cluster.
-2000 Lines Of Code
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.
How to Become an Achievement Developer
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.
PlayStation Programming with MIPS Assembly and C
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.
Cruise Missile Mail
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.
Build Your Own Database From Scratch in Go
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.
Doppler Music Player
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.
Meta
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.
Lou's Pseudo 3d Page
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.
ANTIREAL Archive
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.
New Zealand Law Style Guide - Chapter 4 (Legislation)
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.
Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand
The comprehensive rulebook for how Parliament operates in New Zealand. It has been compiled over many years based on observed practices.
OSINT Industries
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.
Get out of my <head>
A minimal site that points out a handful of HTML meta tags that are no longer necessary in the present.
Subtitle Edit Online
An angular-based webapp that makes it easy to edit subtitles and view the results in real time.
Fitness Dashboard
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.
Auckland Forecasting Centre
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.
BlurHash
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.
The Flemish Scrollers
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.
The Phony Playshitstation
An absurd mailing list thread from 1997 with posters making fun of the Sony Playstation. Some things never change over time, like trolling.
Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List
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.
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform interviews Stephanie McMahon Levesque
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.
FOCUS™ - FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification
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.
webhook.site
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.
New Zealand Information Security Manual
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
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.
ISBN Visualization
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.
pret
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.
Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?
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.
AWS IAM Actions
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.
General Eisenhower's Cigarette Lighter
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.
The Sims Design Documents
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.
Console Variations
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!
Blip
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.
Hacker News Highlighted Comments
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.
Kumu
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.
International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems
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.
Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison
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.
Citizen Archivist
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.
Modern Font Stacks
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.
Apple iPhone was launched, presentation
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.
All Japan videowalks
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.
Classic Connect
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.
Open Source Reporting on NRO Mission Patches
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.
This Is Otakudom: Contributors
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.
NZ Ombudsman: Request made via Twitter
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.
CodePen's 2015 Funding Round
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.
2024
87Permissionless: A Manifesto for the Future of Everything
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.
International Space Station live metrics
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.
World Inequality Database
A database that tracks indicators of inequality across the board, split up by country. It's really just what it says on the tin.
Music Theory that isn't boring
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.
StartupToolchain
A comprehensive list of tools covering all of the various areas that may need consideration when launching a startup.
Validate your problems, startup ideas to create products which people want
A website in the vein of Reddit, where users post perceived gaps that could be addressed by a new startup.
Pkl :: Pkl Docs
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.
TransUnion TLOxp
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 effect
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 Shopping Center v. Robins
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.
Arcades
A comprehensive fan site mapping out arcades around the globe. Not only locations but also the particular machines they have as well.
PlanetRisk's Yeagley on Open-Source Data Predictive Software
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.
I have a high-paying job in an organization based on lies and fear. Is this normal?
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.
Everything Curl
An exhaustive guide to everything you would probably ever want to know about the Curl command line program. What more is there to say?
Internal Documents Reveal NSA Cafeteria Sucks
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.
Understanding Kafka with Factorio
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.
OpenRSS
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.
GeoTrips
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.
Fast Food Index
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.
Bop Spotter
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.
The Matchstiq Top 50
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.
screencasting.com
A screencasting course by Aaron Francis, perhaps best known for creating the highly polished MySQL for Developers course over at Planetscale.
Hack GPON
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.
High Performance SQLite
As it says on the tin, a guide to using SQLite for high performance operations, taught via a high quality video course.
ISO 8583
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.
Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) Reports
When lobbyist's lobby in America, they have to disclose their efforts. You can browse these disclosures on the Senate website.
Migaku
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.
Studs Terkel Radio Archive
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.
Our World In Data
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.
TOR Node List
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!
Subdomain Finder
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.
Wikipedia has Cancer
A writeup from Wikipedia user Guy Macon about how Wikipedia consistently raises ever increasing amounts of money each year with no end in sight.
Bellingcat Filename Finder
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.
DNS Blacklist
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.
認知的焦点化理論
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 Data
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.
World Bank Open Data
The World Bank Group hosts a bunch of data sets relating to global development such as nutritional intake per country.
US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer
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.
Password Rules Validation Tool
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: Wireless Network Mapping
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.
Imagetwin
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.
David Allen on GTD Part 2
Part 2 of David Allen walking through his GTD setup.
David Allen on GTD Part 1
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.
Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit
A collection of tools compiled by Bellingcat that are handy to know about when it comes to performing open source investigations.
Cobalt Tools
A website useful for saving video and audio from a large number of social networking sites such as Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and more.
@DBIVUK on YouTube
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.
The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea
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
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.
Stephen Krashen: Language Acquisition and Comprehensible Input
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.
Math Academy
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.
Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing
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.
Bellingcat Shadow Finder
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: Wireless Capture Tool
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.
The Brutalist Report
An extremely minimalist website that scrapes popular news websites and presents today's headlines in plain text.
GPSJAM GPS/GNSS Interference Map
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.
Art of the Title
A website dedicated to the craft of creating movie titles.
Salesforce/lotsa_data
A large scale dataset used for training machine learning models to recognise timeseries patterns.
Radix UI
A new, relatively pleasant UI framework created by WorkOS. I might use it for a project sometime.
FIRMS: Fire Information for Resource Management System
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.
Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature
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.
Jon Stewart Questions Defense Deputy Secretary on Budget
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.
Microplastics found in every human testicle in study
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.
In 1903, New York Times predicted that airplanes would take 10 million years to develop
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.
New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul - Afghanistan Analysts Network - English
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.
Collective pessimism and our inability to guess the happiness of others
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.
DAVID MAMET MEMO TO "THE UNIT" WRITING STAFF
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.
The Search for Denis Sergeev: Photographing a Ghost
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.
No Web Without Women
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.
Short on Priests, U.S. Catholics Outsource Prayers to Indian Clergy
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.
BLIT
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.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. JEREMY TRAVIS PAYNE
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.
No one buys books
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.
The Cloud Under The Sea
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.
Hexagon CEO was under arrest during results call, investors unaware
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.
Diátaxis
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
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.
Bruno
An upcoming REST client that tries to cover the same feature set as Postman (and Insomnia) while striving to be Git friendly.
jpdb.io
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.
WTF Happened In 1971?
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.
Azure Domain Enumeration
An interesting tool that lets you determine domains associated with Azure Active Directory through a public query.
DAKboard
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.
USAspending
As it suggests on the tin, this is the official place to learn about how much the United States is spending and on what.
Ask vs Guess culture
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.
How Apple accidentally broke my Spotify client
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.
Test Ad Block
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.
Am I Unique?
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.
Amazon ECS Scalability Best Practices
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.
2023
11Contamination of food with newspaper ink: An evidence-informed decision making (EIDM) case study of homemade dessert
A morbidly fascinating paper on home food preparation businesses and the contaminations that can arise from them. It contains some really great imagery.
Beej's Guide to Interprocess Communication
Beej is back with another comprehensive, yet accessible guide. This time it’s about IPC. Not much else to say really!
SFMNPA Navy Manuals and Documents
The San Francisco Maritime National Park Association hosts a bunch of navy documents. Among them are apparently some very accessible guides on electronics.
Explore the In Our Time archive
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.
Hookmark
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.
Gephi
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.
Beneficial Ownership Transparency of Companies and Limited Partnerships (NZ0028)
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.
CURL Converter
A handy tool that translates CURL commands into various other programming languages.
hidutil key remapping generator for MacOS
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.
JSONGenerator
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.
SadServers
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.
2022
8On leaving Mapbox after 12 years
Samal writes about the slow decline of Mapbox after it was acquired. It's the usual story but captured pretty concisely.
Learn Go with Tests
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.
Python behind the scenes #11: how the Python import system works
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.
Class HasThisTypePatternTriedToSneakInSomeGenericOrParameterizedTypePatternMatchingStuffAnywhereVisitor
An extremely verbose name for a Java class. I'm not really sure what else needs to be said.
The SOC2 Starting Seven
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.
Becoming A Whorelord: The Overly Analytical Guide To Escorting
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.
A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
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.
SLO Alerting for Mortals
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.
2021
90Rogue Trader Jerome Kerviel on Bizarre Rome to Paris Pilgrimage Against 'Tyranny of Markets'
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"
All the Things You're Doing Wrong When You Travel, According to Anthony Bourdain
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.
Erroneous Amazon SDE job listing
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 warm welcome to DNS
A relatively user-friendly introduction that still manages to stay RFC compliant. It does a pretty good job on presenting things in simple language.
SKYbrary
A catalogue of various articles and resources related to aviation operations and safety. It contains a bunch of incident investigations.
Steve Yegge's Platform Rant
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.
Why are there no PUT and DELETE methods on HTML forms?
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.
A Unix annoyance (Robot logic)
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.
Second-guessing the modern web
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.
Gently Down The Stream
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!
Farebox recovery ratio
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.
BrandColors
Exactly what it says on the tin, it's a handy utility for finding brand colours.
What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not
An explainer about the difference in how traditional companies view software engineers compared to Silicon Valley. It boils down to freedom and respect really.
The Configuration Complexity Clock
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.
Gemini is Useless
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.
AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System
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.
"Have you ever kissed a girl?"
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.
Bad SSL
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.
Reflections on Trusting Trust
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.
Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years
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.
Loremonger/Cinematic Story Arc
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.
CG Midlander
An almost 1000 page epic detailing the journey taken by the protagonists of the original Final Fantasy 14 CGI trailers.
Actions we propose to take on PR #835
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.
Transport vs Network
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.
Interview with Steven Jay Blum
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.
Interview with Jeff Nimoy
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.
The data model behind Notion's flexibility
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.
Prometheus is borgmon.
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.
2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment
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".
Modifying Resilience Mechanisms in At-Risk Individuals
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.
SQLite is not a toy database
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.
How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents
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.
Internal Combustion Engine
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.
Brandalism Subvertising Manual
A PDF manual walking through the logistics of replacing billboards with art or satirical posters.
readme.so
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).
Knowledge and Practices Regarding Safe Household Cleaning and Disinfection for COVID-19 Prevention
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.
What's going on at Auckland's iMax building?
Chris Schulz explores the seemingly abandoned SkyWorld Entertainment Centre in Auckland and starts to investigate what happened in later entries of this series.
The Origin of Tweet
Craig Hockenberry recounts the history of the word "tweet" and how it came about during the development of Twitterrific
RFC 1918 network range choices
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.
The Definitive Guide To Exploring File Formats
An extremely comprehensive wiki entry on how to explore and extract file formats, such as dumped videogame ROMs.
You Are Not "Behind"
A timeless reminder that you're not ahead or behind of anyone, especially not hypothetical, flawless versions of yourself
Google Developer Documentation Word List
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.
The Centipede's Dilemma
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.
The carbon footprint sham
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 Reinvents the Bus
Lyft debuts Lyft Shuttle, a service where a shuttle travels along predetermined routes during commuter hours, at a fixed rate. Definitely not a bus!
"You are an IBM employee 100% of the time."
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.
Where Did the Other Dollar Go, Jeff?
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.
OKCupid Pulls Article About “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating” in Wake of Match.com Sale
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.
Million Short
A really interesting search engine, whose quirk is that it removes popular results.
trapped in the technologist factory
Zach Tellman on being stuck in an industry that conflates business problems with technical ones.
Mitchell Baker on executive compensation
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.
Improving shell workflows with fzf
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!
Apple’s C.E.O. Is Making Very Different Choices From Mark Zuckerberg
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.
Tailblocks
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.
Bug 1271035 - Disable Places during reftests, preventing 50 GB of I/O
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.
How I Used Lies About A Cartoon to Prove History Is Meaningless on the Internet
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.
Why Do Long Options Start with Two Dashes?
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.
Programming as Theory Building
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.
"I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened."
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.
Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit
A toolkit for inspecting BGP peering and other things. It's handy but I don't really understand most of it yet.
Upcoming Changes to Allagan Tomestone Acquisition
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.
A Random Comment
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.
/u/tormenteddragon summarising how much data FFXIV servers write
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.
Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates
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...!
Some opinionated thoughts on SQL databases
The author outlines his personal list of operational footguns when it comes to operating SQL databases at scale.
TAHs: OKRs for Life Planning
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"
What Cross-Silo Leadership Looks Like
An article from Harvard Business Review giving some insights into how organisations can encourage collaboration that expands across the boundaries of any single silo.
Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don't change.
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.
The dispassionate developer
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.
Commit. This.
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's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage
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.
Bug 36854: [LIST]if list-style-position is inside, bullet takes own line
If you stick a list tag within an h3 tag, it doesn't render properly. This has been a bug for over 20 years.
The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done
Cal Newport recounts the rise of Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann's 43 Folders and the advent of "productivity porn".
Shopify: A StarCraft Inspired Business Strategy
Mike compares Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's strategy to that of Starcraft's Zerg.
A Morning Cola Instead of Coffee?
A 1988 New York Times article suggesting that drinking a coke in the morning could somehow possibly be healthier than drinking coffee
You can't tell people anything
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.
VLANs for the Homelab: A beginner's guide to segmenting networks
A light weight introduction to the concept of VLAN tagging and the tradeoffs between handling tags within software versus hardware.
Opening Remarks at the Securities Regulation Institute
Opening remarks from Chairman Jay Clayton of the SEC, where he touched on the legality of ICOs for the first time publically.
The Great Wikipedia Titty Scandal
The story of a Wikipedia administrator who went all out in creating 80,000 boob-related redirects.
Homesteading the Twittersphere
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.
Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere
Coda Hale giving a talk on the value of metrics from first principles.
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
OVH announced that there is a degradation in performance followed by an announcement that the entire building is on fire
Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
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.
Investigate unusual media traffic pattern for AsterNovi-belgii-flower-1mb.jpg
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.
What's expected of us
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.
Interim Management and Project Recovery: Case Studies
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.
XeePhotoshopLoader.m
An epic rant, in the form of a code comment, about how the Adobe PSD format is awful.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
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.
Implementing FastAPI Services – Abstraction and Separation of Concerns
Camillo Visini on how you might go about structuring a FastAPI application to ensure each module is nicely separated from the rest.
Bug 35890 - IRC clients should specify a Gentoo-specific username
A tongue-in-cheek request to have Gentoo users labelled as such when opening IRC so that the user can automatically block them.
2020
46Show changes over time with Mapbox GL JS
A Mapbox tutorial for showing changes on a map over time. I used it to build my proof of concept Parnell parking heatmap.
Networking for Nerds
Benjamin Reinhardt shares his tips on networking for the less adept.
Chat Stability and Scalability
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.
The Gervais Principle
Venkatesh Rao's series of posts on how The Office perfectly encapsulates organsational power dynamics
Opaque at Both Ends - The Grugq at #TheSAS2019
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.
The Arc of Collaboration
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.
Drop Your Tools – Does Expertise have a Dark Side?
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.
Work Is Work
Coda Hale on an epic semi-rant about how the only feasible way to scale a business, is through force multipliers
There are actually multiple levels of (Instagram) influencing | Hacker News
HN user Pandabob describes the differing influencer tiers, where surprisingly bigger isn't always best
What do executives do, anyway?
apenwarr on the actual role that executives play within a company
The "thing" about being "uneducated" | Hacker News
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.
XML is almost always misused
Hugo Landau on the intended use cases for XML, which is a document markup language and not a data storage format
Running Izzy's "Digivolving" Code
A Tumblr user attempts to recreate source code shown in the original Digimon series
Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them
The way to scale in the presence of errors is automated recovery... or burnout
Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability for Some of the World’s Busiest Gambling Sites
Ian Miell on his learnings from managing Site Reliability teams, and for maintaining documentation
another harlequin
A very colourful glitch art hoodie created by Dataerase
LiveATC
A website that lets you listen to live air traffic controller feeds
Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs
Gergely Orosz on the power of writing engineering proposals
From FOMO to JOMO: the joy of missing out
Anne-Laure Le Cunff on how to be more intentional with your time, rather than succumbing to the fear of missing out
Preparing for Titanfall 2
Various members of the Titanfall 2 team talk about the infrastructure powering the game
Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
Gergely Orosz believes that the ability to write prose is an undervalued superpower for engineers
Ventilated Prose
A style of writing that can aid not only in editing, but also comprehension for the reader
It's time to start writing
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
San Francisco Spent A Decade Being Rich, Important, And Hating Itself.
A comprehensive roundup of every tech-related social issue that affected San Francisco in the last decade
JSON API: Your smart default
Jeremiah Lee, lead Web API developer for Fitbit, talks about why you should consider JSON as your default choice rather than eg; GraphQL
Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?
A great Hacker News thread detailing the various architectures used by different AAA games
StarCraft Remastered: Emulating a buffer overflow for fun and profit
Blizzard adds buffer overflow emulation to StarCraft: Remastered, in order to support old custom maps
GeoPattern
A random pattern is generated based on keyboard input
Alan Key on the importance of messaging
Alan emphasises that the design of messaging between objects is much more important than objects, and their contents themselves.
Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”
Alan explains his thought process what OOP means to him, with the core tenant being a focus on messaging.
Dank Mono
A programming font designed with code and retina displays in mind
Programming Fonts
A site for test driving different programming fonts. It lets you paste code snippets and see how they render, with the appropriate syntax highlighting.
GoAccess
A real time log analyzer that runs in the terminal
The Noun Project
A repository of over 2 million curated, royalty-free icons
Dave Goldberg on music
A memo sent from Dave Goldberg to Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton. It was released as part of the Sony hack.
Coolest Things I Learned in 2019
David Perell lists the best things he discovered in 2019
Enron Email Dataset
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
Windows 10 Desktop by GMUNK
A behind the scenes feature post on the creation of the default wallpaper shipped with Windows 10
Building operational resilience: Impact tolerances for important business services
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.
Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History
Craig Larman and Victor R. Basili on the long history of software development practices
Waterfall
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.
The Red Herring June 1998 issue
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."
A lesson in shortcuts
Rob Pike tells the history of dotfiles, and the can of worms opened by their flawed implementation
Cash/Consent
Lorelei Lee's epic on the the war against sex work, from all directions
Why Evernote Failed to Realize Its Potential
Hiten Shah details the flawed product decisions that reduced Evernote's brand to that of a "failed unicorn"
Jonathan Blow on Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
Jonathan Blow details how software is slowly degrading, as the numerous layers of abstraction cause generations to forget how CPUs work
2019
12CyberChef
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.
Trust but Verify – Brendan Eich
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.
RFC 1178 Choosing a Name for Your Computer
This RFC teaches you what makes a good name for a computer (and also what doesn't make a good name)
The Human Log
The author talks about the importance of keeping a human logbook, to track progress and establish habits
Surprise Bitches! | The Grugq @ TR17
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
Notification Phone Numbers
A list of phone numbers that Pagerduty will call you from, should you have phone calling enabled as a contact method.
"Jerry Seinfeld's" Speakers? | Audiokarma Home Audio Stereo Discussion Forums
An audio forum tried to determine the speaker setup used by Jerry Seinfeld in, well, Seinfeld.
When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop
A behind the scenes look at Slack's newest, and largest refactor, released in 2019
Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1
Andy Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, discusses the Making of Crash Bandicoot in this first of a multi-part series
PEP 513
A PEP that discusses Python wheels and the manylinux1 platform tag
Fleeing from Gmail
The author outlines their alternatives to Gmail, and a few other Google services
Faster, cheaper, and better: A story of breaking a monolith
Fair, a vehicle subscription app, outlines how they broke up their monolith into microservices
2017
242Better Than Free
An article exploring how to create something that is better than the price tag of "free"
It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see...
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
The TCP/IP Guide
An TCP/IP guide that is designed to be comprehensive whilst still being comprehensible
Biggest image in the smallest space
What's the biggest image, by pixel size, that can be accomplished in the fewest number of bytes?
How Uploadcare Built a Stack That Handles 350M File API Requests Per Day
An article about Uploadcare's stack which includes Python and Django
Pull request rejection
A user who recommended that a Code of Conduct be added to awesome-django repo, despite no instigating circumstances that required one
Kadano's perfect Marth class -- advanced frame data application
An amazing look into the meta of Smash Bros gameplay, and also pretty daunting as far as how in depth it is
Scraping user-submitted reviews from the Steam store
A blog post from Intoli about using Scrapy to pull reviews from the Steam store
Bitmap Fonts
A bunch of monospaced bitmap fonts suitable for terminal use
Python's strftime directives
A useful little reference site for using strftime in Python programs.
Reverse Engineering a file format
A useless blog post detailing how to reverse engineering a mysterious h.264 encoded MP4.
Mobile Security Certificate Pinning
Dewhurst Security walk through disabling certificate pinning for the Facebook Android and iOS apps.
ProFont
ProFont is a monospaced, bitmap font.
Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles
Brandon Invergo is a believer in using GNU Stow for dotfile management and this is his setup.
IPv10 Draft
This proposal from Khaled Omar outlines IPv10, a successor to IPv6 which would incorporate IPv4.
The IPv6 mess
D. J. Bernstein believes that IPv6 is a complete mess and outlines his reasons why.
Hidden Game Mechanics
A Twitter thread where different game developers chime in with hidden mechanics that aid the player.
Let's Build a Simple Database
It's something that I couldn't really answer and this SQLite clone tutorial seems to remedy that.
Paradox of tolerance
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.
ES6 for Penetration Testers
This PDF details the changes in ES6 and what security folk should know about it.
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat
Habitat was a graphical multi-user dungeon developed by LucasArts. This writeup details what lessons were learnt after release.
The Old New Thing
It's Raymond Chen's highly acclaimed blog.
Ask HN: What are your favourite developer blogs?
Hacker News outline their favourite developer blogs. Useful for when you're craving some RSS content.
Price FC: Final Conflict 2005
Dave Meltzer recommended the match between Fedor Emelianenko and Mirko Cro Cop. I can't remember why though.
My wonderful world of macOS
Nikita Voloboev outlines his favourite macOS applications.
FastMail reinvents a slicker, quicker wheel
A 2002 article about the initial launch of FastMail.
Google Books Ngram Viewer
A Google tool for viewing how often a word or phrase has appeared in literature over the years.
Autopsy of a slow train wreck
Russell Keith-Magee recounts his experience setting up his company and the slow decline that lead to it being shut down.
Digital Show & Tell
An almost perfect example of how to produce an informative, compelling breakdown on a technical topic.
In Search Of The Red Cross' $500 Million In Haiti Relief
Laura Sullivan brings a special NPR report investigating the Red Cross failure in handling the cleanup of Haiti.
The corporate takeover of the Red Cross
PRI reports on the result of integrating a leader from the for-profit business world into a charity.
The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster
A ProPublica investigation into the Red Cross and their failures handling the aftermath of Superstorm Handy and Hurricane Isaac
Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling Firmware Updates
A nice beginner starting guide for reverse engineering device firmwares
Why is this C++ code faster than my hand-written assembly?
The community explains how the posters assembly can be slower than that of a higher level language.
JustTrustMe
An Xposed module for Android that disables SSL pinning for applications.
Starbucks should really make their APIs public.
A blog post detailing how to reverse engineer an API and undo certificate pinning.
Deluge Systemd guide
An informative guide on how to setup a systemd service that can be applied to anything besides Deluge.
You Are Not Google
You don't need some crazy big database because you're not Google!
MapReduce: A major step backwards
The author lays out why they believe MapReduce isn't all it's cracked up to be.
War Is Hell: Welcome to the Twitter Wars of 2011
The story of Bill Gross and his Twitter client buy out.
Best websites a programmer should visit
I mean, it is what it says on the tin.
Always bet on text
The author talks about why text is the most stable communication technology.
Exercism
A site with lots of programming examples to fix.
Projects
A list of programming projects that can be implemented in any language.
Awesome Elixir
A list of useful Elixir resources.
Cowboy
A small, fast, modern HTTP server for Erlang.
Visual Studio Code - My Preferences/Plugins/Themes
A VS Code setup recommended by @requisite0.
Phoenix
A framework recommended by @requisite0.
Elixir
A language that leverages the Erlang VM. Used by iwantmyname and recommended by @requisite0.
jpegtran
A lossless JPEG resizer.
OptiPNG
A PNG optimizer that recompresses images to a small size.
Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
Hacker News commenters list books they consider worth checking out.
Yuji Oshimoto: Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4+ or Explorer 4+
A look back at mid-2000 era site designs.
List of fictional computers
Useful for naming projects.
Learning Swift, 2nd Edition
This book will teach how to build macOS and iOS apps.
SurviveJS
A book that steps through how to build a Kanban application in React.
Awesome Falsehood
A list of common myths in programming.
Revamp your Mac OSX terminal experience
A guide to using vim and tmux on macOS.
Practice Python
A collection of exercises for learning Python.
Hues
Nice looking Python colours.
Python Pentest Tools
A useless list of y'know, what the title says.
SSL/TLS and PKI History
A great timeline based overview of SSL/TLS's past and future.
vis.js
A nice looking graphing library.
Loupe
An useful site for visualising the Javascript event loop.
3D Tetris with Three.js Tutorial
2D Tetris would be enough I think.
Building an atom
A starting guide to using Three.js.
crt.sh
A searchable database of certificates.
Jargon File
A go-to source for unix jargon
Credit Card Numbers Generator
Great for testing purposes.
Build Your Own Lisp
What better way to learn about programming languages than to make your own?
Why does Google prepend while(1); to their JSON responses?
An interesting breakdown of Google's API responses.
Abstruse Goose #389
Just use simple words! Silly economists.
A New Way to Be Mad
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.
Vulnerability Notes
A Knowledge Base of major security issues.
Map Age Guide
Ever wondered how old that map is?
Dead franchises almost nobody but you seems to want back
NeoGAF lists out a bunch of franchises that I may not have heard about. I haven't read the list.
JS Stack from Scratch
A guide to building various Javascript build environments.
Hybrid war – does it even exist?
Well, it's worth asking!
Hybrid warfare
A unique form of warfare that some accuse Russia of employing.
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
A relatively obscure Japanese title that still hasn't received an English patch unfortunately.
Paperclip maximizer
A great read exploring the idea of an AI that strives for maximum efficiency.
Dwitter
What would happen if you took Twitter's character limit and applied it to Javascript?
Teach Yourself Computer Science
Yup, what it says.
Accounts and Database Dumps
A comprehensive list of database dumps.
Represent
An improved resume service I should try out.
Creative Kawaii Lamp
A very cute (and cheap) moon shaped lamp.
Dahir Bullsaat
A Google Drive repository of Retsupurae's popular Dahir Insaat videos.
Stories Untold
A compilation tape of four experimental adventures.
Programmer Competency Matrix
Useful to finding out what you don't know that you don't know.
Cloudcraft
A tool for visualizing cloud architecture layouts.
dvbsnoop
A program for debugging, dumping and viewing digital stream information sent via satellite, cable or terrestrial.
The little book about OS development
Pretty much everything you could want to know about operating system development.
Animated Content Aware Scaling script
Niel Cicierega's wacky photoshop script.
OverEncrypt
A guide to strengthening Lets Encrypt certificates.
Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op
An interesting example model of supply and demand.
How to check if an email address exists without sending an email?
Yup, you can do that. Here's a quick overview of the commands.
Some of my favourite programming books
The author lists their favourite programming books as you might expect.
Books Programmers Don't Really Read
A list of books that programmers like to throw around but haven't actually read. I should probably read them.
Movie Audio Commentaries AC3 Thread
A comprehensive list of audio commentaries usually reserved as special features for DVDs.
Sam's Laser FAQ
Everything you could ever want to know about lasers!
Git from the inside out
A step by step breakdown that roughly explains how Git works.
List of emerging technologies
Exactly what it says on the tin.
The Chronicles of George
A collection of support tickets from an aggravated helpdesk worker.
Pointer Pointer
No matter where you move your mouse, this site will find it for you.
The Useless Web
This site will take you to a randomly chosen useless website.
CSS Reference
A guide to CSS where each entry is accompanied by a visual example.
A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing Technology
The author explores the various issues that stem from computing.
Write a System Call
A step by step guide to writing your first system call for fun!
Martyr2's Mega Project Ideas List!
A thread keeping a comprehensive list of possible practice programs.
Signalling System No. 7
An overview of the protocols used for most of the world's telephone networks.
Mail Tester
This service lets you check that your email won't be rejected as spam.
Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99%
Scott Hanselmen talks about the unseen developers who aren't using bleeding edge tools or interesting languages.
Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future
The author explores the idea that society is an endless back and forth between both political extremes.
The Languages Which Almost Became CSS
While CSS may not be ideal, we could have had it worse.
Ghost in the Shell PS1 Making Of footage
A rare look at the behind the scenes of the opening FMV.
The Retrogaming Database
A site that uses GIFs and images in an interesting way.
Myths about /dev/urandom
It turns out that /dev/urandom and /dev/random aren't to be treated the same.
Google API Design Guide
Google's guide for designing their own services which they generalised and released to the public.
Kami no Shizuku (2009)
A live action Japanese adaption of The Drops of God manga.
Robert M. Parker Jr.
He's the Dave Meltzer of wine or is Dave the Robert Parker of Wrestling?
You Don't Know JS
A series of open source books detailing elements of Javascript in depth.
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
An explainer on why Unix systems have directories like /bin and /usr/bin.
Chesterton's fence
The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
A Conflict of Visions
Thomas Sowell explores why the same people tend to disagree on a multitude of topics that have no political affiliation.
The West Wing (1999–2006)
Inside the lives of staffers in the West Wing of the White House.
Time Trumpet (2006)
A T.V sketch show set in the future looking back over the beginning of the 21st century, between 2005 and 2030.
Progress bar noticeably slows down npm install
A classic NPM bug where showing the progress bar would result in performance slowdowns of up to 50%!
What is the explanation for these bizarre JavaScript behaviours mentioned in the 'Wat' talk for CodeMash 2012?
As the title suggests, a user breaks down why operations in the famous "wat" video work at all.
n-gate
A blog featuring very sarcastic weekly roundups of Hacker News content.
Beej's Guide to Network Programming
A how-to guide on network programming using sockets.
PermID
A service from Thomson Reuters that assigns unique IDs to businesses, founders and so on for information processing.
Build Your Own Text Editor
A 184 step guide to building your own text editor in C.
List of computer technology code names
A great resource for possible project names.
The Homely Mutt
A very detailed writeup about using Mutt for macOS.
How to fake a sophisticated knowledge of wine with Markov Chains
The author explains how Markov chains work and how they built an automated wine reviewer using it.
Reactide
The first ever React IDE which looks like Atom and React Dev Tools had a baby.
Tippy.js
A cute lightweight tooltip library.
Recommended # of iterations when using PKBDF2-SHA256?
A comprehensive answer regarding the recommended number of iterations to use when encrypting passwords.
JS: The Right Way
A guide to best practices with Javascript compiled from numerous developers and organisations.
4 JavaScript Design Patterns You Should Know
A roundup of various design patterns to consider when creating a module or library.
SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition
A complete guide to using SSH securely.
Dependency inversion principle
The idea that modules shouldn't have to depend on each other but instead on abstractions.
Show HN: A simple way to get options prices for free
Hacker News commenters weigh in with useful endpoints for getting financial data.
Maildir
The standard format for storing emails.
The Submarine
Paul Graham examines how PR firms influence news publications, in this case through the seemingly endless return of "suits".
Beast Within
I don't remember why I bookmarked this but it must be pretty good?
Dabase
Another blog from Kai Hendry with a focus on more technical bits.
Natalian
Kai Hendry's personal blog.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
A philosophical title where the author attempts to identify a relationship between language and reality.
Factiva
A global news database that would be useful for applying again different sectors like finance to track response from the public to news events.
An Introduction to Programming in Go
For those who are looking for a step by step guide to the Go programming language.
Hotjar
An analytics library that can record detailed heatmaps of user sessions.
Working on The Witness, Part 11
The author details his time cleaning up code for The Witness and general C++ best practices.
That Sleek Ubuntu Desktop Mockup Is Now A Real Working Theme
A nice looking theme for use with Ubuntu.
tewi
A nice bitmap font that's free to use.
WON/F4W
The online version of the Wrestling Observer which is also home to Wrestling Observer radio.
Questorming: exploring the unknown unknowns
The author explains how to use question based brainstorming to come up with ideas that are more likely to work.
NZPWI
Apparently New Zealand has our own "pro-wrestling news source".
Particle swarm optimization
A computational method intended to simulate social behaviour. It has a neat GIF.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
Well, it is true after all!
Pegasus Mail and Mercury
The longest running email system on the internet!
Show HN: Webhook – A lightweight configurable tool written in Go
A Hacker News user creates a webhook library only for other commenters to weigh in with their own libraries.
Facebook: greater than 15% of employees are H1Bs
Hacker News commenter davidw explains what he believes to be a misunderstanding of the realities surrounding H1B holders.
The byte order fallacy
Important to know if you're building a compiler, which I'm not.
How to configure postgresql for the first time?
I always forget how to do this so it's a useful guide to consult.
PostgreSQL vs. MS SQL Server
This site compares the two aforementioned databases. Spoiler: He hates MS SQL.
Go's Error Handling is Elegant
The author discusses why he believes that Go handles errors better than most other languages.
The Essential Stardust☆Genius, Tetsuya Naito!
A Reddit user has compiled a list of essential Tetsuya Naito matches to watch.
Escunado is best car ever
A strange thread about Gran Turismo 2 on the GameFAQs forums.
Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
Hacker News commenters discuss the 1939 Worlds Fair and what was left as a result.
Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
Hacker News commenters weigh in with business advice for software developers.
Database normalization
The process of reducing data redundancy and improving integrity. Put simply, making sure your data doesn't become a tangled mess.
pygit
The author built a 500 line Git client using Python and explains each step in this post.
QuickAddress Pro
It's /that service/ companies use to autocomplete your address when you buy something.
Understand Go pointers in less than 800 words or your money back
Well, I didn't pay anything but I feel a lot more enlightened on pointers now!
A Beginner's Hip Hop Playlist
Surprising to find on Github, user zmatilsky901 has constructed a list of recommended Hip Hop songs.
How To Secure Your Web App With HTTP Headers
As it says in the title, a quick guide to securing your HTTP headers.
The Chronicle
Aaron Bieber's blog. He writes about emacs a lot. In fact, I think every post is about emacs!
8values
My results from the 8values political scale. Apparently I'm closest to being a Social Libertarian.
Final Fantasy X-2 Optimal 100% Story Completion Guide
Looking to get all the trophies for Final Fantasy X-2? This is what you should be checking!
Louis Theroux's BBC Two specials
A comprehensive list of Louis Theroux's documentary specials.
Emotional tone scale
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's scale for emotional "liveliness".
Prettify your Windows terminal
Noopkat writes about her development environment on Windows.
Big-O Algorithm Complexity Cheat Sheet
A simple chart that maps out Big O in an easy to grasp manner.
Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature
An article from Troy Hunt that is exactly what it says on the tin.
The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz
A text only copy of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailing the life and death of "computer genius" Phil Katz, pioneer of the zip file.
The God Login
This post details a number of design decisions to consider when creating a user login.
RFC 822
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.
Offlineimap with SSL files on OSX
The author details how to get SSL certificates working with Offlineimap for macOS.
alt-J
A band that I keep hearing mentioned but know nothing about.
OpenSnitch
A GNU/Linux port of Little Snitch, a whitelist based firewall.
mini.css
A minimal, responsive CSS framework.
The Assault
A story covering the life of a survivor in Haarlem during World War II. The Baudelaires mention it as being their favourite book.
Looking for metadata in all the wrong places
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%!
Preparing for Tech Interviews with Paul Carleton of Stripe
Max Mautner discusses interview tactics with Paul Carleton of Stripe. The transcript is very lengthy.
Slow PS4 Downloads
Juho Snellman's writeup about how slow PS4 downloads can be attributed to a small TCP receive window.
Jobbl
Toggl's backend developer test.
Logos
The concept of reasoned discourse and how people perceive it? I'm still hazy on the concept.
Grind Session
A Playstation 1 skateboarding title that apparently has a really good soundtrack.
How do I get an apk file from an Android device?
A post detailing the basics of extracting an APK from an Android device.
Extracting My Data from the Hello Sense
The author details how he went about reverse engineering his fitness tracker.
"The internet can be, and is, lent to propogration of both wonder and hatred"
The author of the quote responds to Tim Berners-Lee's comments on net neutrality.
"Forgotten Japanese Spirit"
Bunraku Sake that Hulk Hogan was once drinking on Twitter.
node-mangafox
A currently existing Mangafox Node library I might try to rewrite in the future.
Authentication Techniques for APIs
A Google spreadsheet comparing various authentication techniques for APIs.
8 NPM Tricks You Can Use to Impress Your Colleagues
A list of lesser known commands for use with NPM.
Simulacra and Simulation
A book exploring the relationships between reality, symbols and society.
Wabi-sabi
A concept in Japanese aesthetics that focuses on accepting imperfection.
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design
A number of heuristics you should strive for when designing a user interface.
"I need a free developer for my brilliant idea"
Although it goes without saying, an article explaining why you should never expect a developer to work on your idea for free.
Startup Graveyard
This site explains the history of failed startups and breaks down what went wrong.
dircolors
You can use dircolors to specify the colour of file extensions in bash.
Hero Icons
A group of CSS icons available for reuse.
Hero Patterns
A series of repeatable SVG patterns available for reuse.
date-fns
A date time library where the functions are modularised.
JS Joda
An immutable date and time library.
Sugar
A Javascript utility library for working with native objects.
PBKDF2
A password hashing function that I should probably check out.
"The ideas that are convenient to express become the content of a culture."
A Hacker News commenter explaining why our ideas seemingly become more and more simple.
Little Things I Like to Do with Git
The author details some neat uses for Git.
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
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.
Consider re-licensing to AL v2.0, as RocksDB has just done
A Github comment in which it is determined that Facebook has no interest in relicensing React.
Crawl OST
I discovered Crawl after Crowbcat used the song Toccata.
Shantae and the Pirate's Curse OST
I particularly like Scuttle Town.
Useless Use of Cat Award
The author explains that a number of unix commands are used in ways that are redundant.
Commandlinefu
A large list of useful unix commands.
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World
The author's father supposedly predicted a president similar to Donald Trump back in 1985.
The Perimeter of Ignorance
An article about how intelligent individuals try to substitute a lack of information with supernatural explanations.
Moon
A nice one column Jekyll blog theme.
Lessons learned from reading postmortems
An article on lessons learnt from software postmortems.
An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode
A guide to Unicode in regards to foreign languages.
Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
An article discussing why companies who seemingly progress so little publicly require so many employees.
The Circle
A novel about a woman who joins an Internet company that starts out great but begins to fall apart.
Genocidal Organ
A Project Itoh novel about a world transformed into a surveillance hell.
Linguistic Relativity
The idea that a speaker's world view is influenced by their primary language.
Nikrich's Portfolio
An interesting example of a Jekyll portfolio.
From bootloader to kernel
A Gitbook detailing the Linux kernel booting process.
Linux Kernel documentation
The documentation for the Linux kernel. Well over my head but it should be an interesting read.
Wesbot
Wes Bos's automated font bot. A good example of how to use Twitter's stream functionality.
An early mention of Dropbox on Hacker News
The user dhouston would go on to make Dropbox as we know it.
Spurious Correlations
A fun site that does exactly what it says on the tin.
On Conference Speaking
It's about the preparation required for conference talks and how they're not so straight forward.