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https://brandur.org/sequences/2020-light/006 https://t.co/jMaw9f9dIC10 days

All of Canon, Fuji, Leica, Nikon, and Sony are doing their best work ever in cameras/optics, and there's still plenty of interest.

https://brandur.org/sequences/2020-light/005 https://t.co/9PbfUcYEmv21 days

My grandfather using Dictaphone "Time-Master" circa '50s. It used new "Dictabelt" tech to store audio to plastic belts instead of wax cylinders. Magnetic tape would come ~10 years later. https://t.co/P4RobzI9G5about 1 month

Downloads page: Here are RPMs, Homebrew invocation, some other stuff. Not using those? Here's a pre-built binary that you can dump onto any Linux system and be up and running in 3 seconds.

Throw against the wall, throw against the wall, throw against the wall.

Throw quickly against the wall until MVP. Refactor. Harden. Refactor. Harden.2 months

(If you like horror) but it's practically in a genre of its own: Almost entirely in daylight, ~zero jump scares, no monster. Clever, subtle dialog, amazing scene and costume design. Stress just keeps escalating.

sig { params(io: T.any(IO, StringIO, Tempfile)).void }

Gets me every time:

(I wrote my own version for Nanoglyph a few weeks back, but this is better.)

It goes all in on Go Modules (we held off a long time in the hopes Dep would build in basic Modules awareness).

And in general: Very worthwhile putting something like this into your site's toolchain. MozJPEG shrunk my images to an average of 40% their original size!

I cut ~half a minute off build times by realizing there was a pre-installed `awscli` and using that instead of fetching it via `apt`.

Leaves a useful trail for colleagues and/or your own reference, but prevents review-writing from turning into a major project.3 months

• Open app (e.g. Notes, iA Writer) on target device.

Only 100+ chapters to go. https://t.co/CuCG8cy7L63 months

I've recently taken to copying backtraces into Vim buffers to make them searchable.3 months

This sort of standalone push of independent content embodies the most aspirational aspects of the early web.

Pleasantly surprised so far: EXIF information in Finder _alone_ is such a killer feature to easily have made it worthwhile. https://t.co/VFWd9BXTl13 months

https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/010-monterey https://t.co/QR4PT7gp8n5 months

First impressions: Cloud Build is awesome (totally avoided installing local Docker), excellent custom domain setup/TLS, way too expensive but may work for tiny projects, GCP TUI/GUI both underwhelming but functional.6 months

Copy the current path in a focused Finder window with ⌥ Option + ⌘ Command + C.

Yep I'm boring, but practically a perfect day off.6 months

This week going out in ~1 hour.

Me: The present is so stylistically unremarkable that we're like an elderly generation reminiscing on a more vibrant past. Also me: sign me up. https://t.co/4cxRHoD9oY7 months

Last week's: an old Heroku eggnog recipe, and a dive into GitHub Actions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20… https://t.co/hxZHIAHbsb7 months

The logo is a little homely, but it's a *great* story.

Thankful that Apple didn't lay it on _too thick_ with superlative rhetorical bullsh*t about "reinventing the keyboard" or anything like that after the new variant is clearly a revert of a Really, Truly, Worst-of-Apple-hubristic-design Bad Idea. https://t.co/pn8ax4a18S8 months

(And if enough of us do it, it'll significantly dilute the value of these dark techniques.) https://t.co/T63KePsIZZ8 months

I get an inordinate amount of pleasure examining tracking pixels from recruiters (in source) and knowing that they can no longer trust their surreptitious telemetry. https://t.co/GDwCWBn5aY8 months

All in all, not too different, but really like the formalized build steps — output is a lot easier to read. Also, access to more modern packages via Docker.

e.g. If Apache Struts as disclosed three major remote execution vulnerabilities in four years, consider avoiding it.

Near Bunaken, Indonesia. https://t.co/RAt3803Seo8 months

Highlights: eagle rays, sea turtles, mantis shrimp (!!), clouds of silversides, seahorse, lionfish (invasive species) hunting, diving 300 ft wreck. https://t.co/oF6n6LJpPS9 months

3 years ago, not worth spending one second thinking about taking an iPhone photo in the dark. A year ago: possible, with bad results. Now: good. https://t.co/coiYnNh0yG9 months

Apple knocked it out of the park. In including it, but also the new Camera app design, which subtly shows what 0.5x might look like from the 1x view. https://t.co/NY4ESUgwmZ10 months

One of the most airtight models in software design: ORMs for basic fetches and persistence. SQL for the complicated stuff.

We could stand to have more information on how to build code and patterns to work with limiting, so if anyone has specific requests, I'll try to integrate them over the next week or so.

Tried VS Code + LSP in Go, Rust, and C — they all worked without me writing a single line of configuration. We're finally close.10 months

Took 3 hours to get a setup better than a vimrc/plugin config curated over 10+ years, with the 80% of Vim people actually use, functional completion, jump to def, and "hover" docs.10 months

This is now the best long walk that I know of in the Bay Area. https://t.co/XtvulyZc8710 months

Should I stop? Are there any other great format tricks I'm missing?10 months

Stopping at crosswalks, red lights, and stop signs is informally not required in San Francisco — dangerous norms blessed by the SFPD by comprehensive non-enforcement. https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1167442617031…10 months

(Especially in California) Owning only one pair of raw denim is more than enough, but the feel/weight/heft on these is pretty satisfying. https://t.co/3Xd8JvkyXr10 months

Luckily I have no skin in the game, but it's amazing that language designers made this mistake after the hard lesson of Python 2 to 3 — a division that will have taken 12 years to resolve (if the 2020 sunset works this time).10 months

However, one limitation only raised given a thorough read of the docs is that because indexes are partition-local, there's no easy way to enforce a unique constraint across all of them, which hurts many use cases.11 months

We'd love it if you gave it a try!

With nice Markdown rendering, good typography, code rendering, and linkable headers, it's more pragmatic than most dedicated blogs.11 months

And in case you missed it: await was implemented postfix (`x.await` instead of `await(x)`) for chainability. Contentious at the time, but so obviously the right decision now.

Working in high-level languages almost all the time, it's been a _really_ long time since I had to think about pointer widths and re-arranging bits with shifts and masks.

Metrics and dashboards are great, but despite its inefficiencies, logging will always have a place in operations — it gets you insight in tight spots that you'd never have otherwise.

“You're crying,” Herb said.12 months

Alameda’s view of SF is wonderful too. https://t.co/8DdbE0n7sI12 months

> “As a matter of principle, RE2 does not support constructs for which only backtracking solutions are known to exist. Thus, backreferences and look-around assertions are not supported.”

(But ~none in Go or Rust, which don't backtrack.)

Stabilizing straps are so good and the pack so light/breathable that commuting down/up the mountain to/from work with a 13” MBP feels like no trouble at all. Should’ve gotten one years ago. https://t.co/WLHb6Dkfae12 months

It was underpowered, but it turns out that was fine for 95% of what I actually want to do on a computer. And a form factor so tiny that you could throw it in your bag and forget it was even there.12 months

It’s apparently even worse in South Korea — they’re now experimenting with ground traffic signals to save smombies (“SMartphone zOMBIES”) from walking into traffic.

Original implementation assumed that most requests aren't blocked, but found that on 250k reqs across top 500 domains, _39%_ were. Almost half going to ads/tracking!

* A gov’t that rivals SF in dysfunction. Defies physics.

https://brandur.org/sequences/berlin/007 https://t.co/7XXyHcktDgJune 17, 2019 11:25

https://brandur.org/sequences/berlin/004 https://t.co/mvHshkJqe3June 14, 2019 17:01

https://brandur.org/sequences/berlin/003 https://t.co/cpQkZUF35ZJune 13, 2019 08:59

https://brandur.org/sequences/berlin/002 https://t.co/a99VOAr2PjJune 10, 2019 11:14

(Not very original, but a good place to start.)

One of Rust's best-maintained projects, and just as importantly, targets stable instead of nightly (unlike most alternatives).

(And if you have ideas for amazing things to see while I'm here — send them my way!)

Also: Vim file saving trivia including unusual case of file “4913”.

So many great points — I'm 100% convinced. Most important talk of the year. Maybe the decade.

I now have a recurring urban fantasy that the navy finishes radiological cleanup and turns it over as a national park with ~no redevelopment — San Francisco's Tempelhof. https://t.co/lqNoLwoxOEMay 22, 2019 04:12

It's in Swedish, but luckily, there are no lyrics.

This morning I wondered how difficult it would be to implement graceful restart with exec on usr2. Went from idea to refined impl in < 30 min.May 11, 2019 18:30

By setting Gmail on Vimium's exclude list, but then excluding almost every key, you can have get both Gmail shortcuts *and* Vimium's "F" function.

Especially for large/complex projects, the opposite is true. Without human care, most would last days, or with luck, weeks.May 2, 2019 17:08

The format may have started as a joke, but this site goes above and beyond by providing the ultimate executive summary, and linking relevant PRs, RFCs, and projects. Excellent way of staying apprised.April 30, 2019 20:34

(Admittedly, mostly just self-satisfying complaining, but trivial flaws amplified by constant, around-the-clock use compound into slightly-less-trivial flaws.)

Here are a few of mine: Tron Legacy, Oblivion, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible (the good one). https://t.co/IdWh8NlaxgApril 27, 2019 14:32

More off-Twitter tiny indy web content please! Playing with some ideas of my own for future trips.

Finally did a course there last night, and although compact and aged in very SF ways, it’s a delight. https://t.co/CPeWitJZBCApril 24, 2019 15:06

This is something the team's been wanting to do this for *years*. More info and migration guide: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-java/wiki/Migrati… https://t.co/TgtVdTu2ZaApril 10, 2019 20:20

Speaking as a somewhat colour-impaired person, the old/current map (2nd image) has always been borderline unintelligible because of heavy reliance on adjacent colours. https://t.co/etECeq6CARApril 9, 2019 19:54

So soon after the end of winter the province is a monochrome landscape of lifeless brown, and these little splashes of colour are a delight. https://t.co/xapPkgtxfHApril 8, 2019 17:09

The update to http://isairpoweroutyet.com was expedient, accurate, and definitive. https://t.co/lYzcuimOwUMarch 29, 2019 19:48

It's *so* good to see innovation on that front. The traditional serverless model of "1 request = 1 container" is grossly inefficient. Memory use and startup times are important.March 29, 2019 15:11

So much positive signal even from just the initial list of supported languages: Rust, C, TypeScript. Someone there has good taste :)

https://logicmag.io/07-the-chinese-burner/ https://t.co/gV16e85jqWMarch 27, 2019 17:36

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/0… https://t.co/Du7mraoPCFMarch 27, 2019 15:14

Why are we supposed to be using this thing again? https://t.co/AyeaaugxMaMarch 26, 2019 16:53

It's one of the best known classics and Joyce gave interviews after publication, but still, not even the most pre-eminent literary critics have a clue what happened in this book.

I'm a die-hard terminal person for life, but it's so much better. Especially during the duress of an incident, there's nothing like being able to click boxes to resolution instead of looking up obscure CLI flags.March 21, 2019 00:29

(And looking forward to experiencing this myself when the 2022 MacBook refresh brings in an all-Touch Bar keyboard.)

One line of code in your app and CA valid HTTPS just works. No magic load balancers, no Nginx. We should hope that the future of all server-side programming is this simple.

Excellent writing, and better than fiction. Worth hoisting to the top of your read list.

But is there a point where a game pulls in too much real life? This one was a few design calls from having me brush Arthur’s teeth before bed, trim toenails weekly, and do 45 min/day on the elliptical.February 20, 2019 12:40

(Context: it's really coming down in SF right now.) https://t.co/Bo3VxiQhgXFebruary 13, 2019 19:34

SortSupport is a really neat optimization in Postgres that makes sorting fast even for data types that are large or arbitrarily-sized. Here we take a look at the details.

Wasted literally 45 minutes debugging because unlike any sane language, the bitwise `&` operator has lower precedence than comparisons like `==` (so guess what happens when you evaluate `a & b == 1`). Fuuuu.January 29, 2019 14:56

With more dangerous pointer casts than lines of code, C is terrifying, but there's also satisfaction working so close to the metal. Before this, I hadn't had to think about how values look in binary or endianness since university.January 27, 2019 18:37

Also comes with uncomfortable levels of insight: “That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.”

Fortunately, ripping out and reinstalling the entire toolchain including nightly, rustfmt, and clippy took < 5 min (there's even `rustup self uninstall`). If only all software were so well behaved!January 20, 2019 18:19

Pause for a moment. Turn up the volume (not generally, but for some temporary extra detail). Listen.

Did the vault bar and push ups. https://t.co/rKSIeUcgRgJanuary 13, 2019 19:35

Here’s a novel take on them:

iOS is designed to be inflexible, unconfigurable, and unyielding. Over time it will be corrected minutely, but can't fundamentally change.January 3, 2019 16:45

(Normally, Safari chooses a URL for you even if you're at the exact location you want.)

I can't think of a better time to set some more ambitious goals for 2019.December 31, 2018 18:04

Built by a small shop, but more refined, flexible, reliable, and beautiful than competing products from ~trillion dollar companies, despite having a much broader problem to solve.December 20, 2018 02:35

“Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a thousand times more sexy than a sunburnt palm, and more primal and contemplative, too.”

We most often talk about what features a programming language has, but just as important are what features it *doesn't* have. It is possible to write good C++, but the odds are way against you.

Given the nature of the hardware (wireless, tiny batteries), I'm **astonished** at how reliable and durable they've been over that lifespan. Quite possibly the best product Apple's ever shipped.December 14, 2018 05:16

Contains, amongst other things, the most peaceful redwood grove within city limits. (And it's always free with proof of a local address). https://t.co/ybZK5Dqw5gDecember 9, 2018 16:43

Fast unit tests and a suite that runs in minutes locally (or less!) is productivity manifest. Making CI the dev feedback loop embraces the opposite.

And to be clear, this is a smart move — their Yahoo-era free tier was too generous and unsustainable.

The new implementation is a YAML file + Dropbox. Good for fewer moving parts, but still a little sad — Flickr must have been my oldest still-in-use internet service.December 2, 2018 18:50

My favourite part is how new futures return just a single type so you can use `Result` and all its furnishings like `?`.

The wealthy maximize ROI (and housing is a great asset). Land owners maximize rent (and that's AirBnB).

Unsanforized (sanforized = treated to minimize shrinking) and not prewashed, they're expected to shrink on 1st soak. These shrunk ~2 sizes and from baggy to slim. https://t.co/I0XC28v2FtNovember 28, 2018 17:00

Its only mistake in not being considered a sci-fi classic was that it wasn't made in the 80s. https://t.co/PWO2hacwXmNovember 27, 2018 16:31

Surreal how much of 2018 has been defined by forest fires.November 20, 2018 12:23

By the time I've ⌘-Tab'ed back to my browser, the page is already re-rendered there without even a ⌘-R necessary. It's beautiful.November 18, 2018 22:05

Like compiled over interpreted, it'd be harder to learn, but more reliable once you finish learning.November 18, 2018 22:05

It's been surprisingly painful. Hugo's core is Go, but all user-space coding is done via markup/tags, so that nice compile-time checking vanishes. When you do something wrong, it's rarely obvious what it is.November 18, 2018 22:04

(Or, duct tape is more expensive than you think.)November 12, 2018 23:03

These days (since 4k?) buying new technology is step 0. The next week is guessing at problems by reading underinformed arcana online, non-deterministically troubleshooting, and upgrading cables.November 9, 2018 17:11

(Maybe noteworthy if you've never heard of a forbidden header before.)

I like paper better, but read ~entirely digitally these days for usability: size, portability, one-handed use. For 10+ years now, US paperbacks have been optimizing shape for the most exotic/awkward.

The number in the upper right on the sign on the huge barrel in the last photo is the holding capacity. 32,275 litres (with the largest being ~50k). https://t.co/VOUEVEsvOzOctober 31, 2018 11:07

Relatedly though, I’ve been charmed by Portugal’s population of feral cats. Here’s one sunning himself in the alleys of Coimbra. https://t.co/SrdWPActtXOctober 29, 2018 15:54

Naturally, in the first shot he slowly walked up to the bobcat until he was at ~3m distance. As you do, (in Canada). https://t.co/LEkwVn7rSJOctober 29, 2018 15:48

With Postgres' current MVCC design, the cost of old data is borne by ALL transactions, while a Zheap UNDO model pushes expense to old snapshots, having the effect of optimizing for current data. Very exciting for production.

Postgres is a database, but also a runtime (fully custom memory management infrastructure), a standard library (custom string builder, linked list, hash map, sorting, ...), and even language (custom longjmp-based try/catch/raise mechanisms).October 24, 2018 17:05

Stop romanticizing Make/old Unix commands/shell scripts, and help make them die.October 19, 2018 22:50

This piece covers a few ways to make efficient use of available connections through techniques like pools and minimum viable checkouts.

Never even consider using one outside of an incognito window.

Today, it's still not clear if it was a documentary or mockumentary, or who Banksy is.

Apple knocked it out of the park with dark mode — just beautiful, and being integrated into all the default apps makes it real this time (as opposed to the idea's long history of hacks). The double night and day default wallpapers are such a nice touch too.October 7, 2018 17:09

(And he's right on this one too.)

Green threads might not be as fast as a perfectly implemented async model, and they need a runtime, but they're still the right compromise between speed and usability.

More integrations is generally good, but Jira is the exception. When software is this irredeemably bad, don't integrate with it, replace it. Remember GitHub Projects? Good idea. Now finish the other 50%.

Editorial: In practice Postgres w/ JIT + partitioning may outperform traditional data warehouses for those willing to keep data size in check. Hope to one day ditch Redshift.

Staggering dedication, and a reminder of what's possible without organizational overhead. This guy ships more than entire departments of some companies.

I love this kind of language nicety. It'll save ten seconds at a time, and thousands of hours in aggregate.

Our urban planners should be replaced. We need new blood.

There are two paths in data architecture: use a relational database, or build a pale shadow of one in your app layer as you desperately try to shore up data integrity on your non-relational store.

It seems silly on the surface, but she was absolutely right. In the age of text we speak with more people, but at lower fidelity.September 11, 2018 03:21

Amen. The Achilles heel of the developer/author.

Light text on black rendered poorly on screens for decades, which was frustrating because it looks *incredible* in print. Retina has since improved things a lot, even if I still wouldn't push it for long text pieces. https://t.co/BSfpNIVzwoSeptember 2, 2018 23:19

GitHub's integration with it is impressive, but the subtleties around its magic ended up causing a lot of trouble by the end. I also burnt through GitHub's meager/not-well-advertised data quota in < 1h of use.September 2, 2018 01:33

e.g. Intersection Observer for lazy loading images. After a copy/paste I had this working in 10s flat.

I put together some background on why it's important here —

I like when I'm not the only saying this stuff. Here's FoundationDB's transaction manifesto:

Prior to this, services like SSH on Windows servers would spawn off-screen consoles which were fed keystrokes and scraped for output to send back to clients. Crazy!

A key problem in software is that as it grows absent strong controls, interfaces widen until everything is exposed to everything.August 22, 2018 16:18

The quality of work produced by solo artists these days is a little terrifying because I don't completely understand how it's possible.

Shared tooling is nice, but there is no stronger downward force on software quality than tragedy of the commons, and a pervasive nihilism that stems from it.August 15, 2018 16:33

In San Francisco, we have exactly zero streets that are safe for walking/biking/play, and precious few places to escape traffic noise. We could stand to learn from Europe.

Next time you use it, know that you're in the good company of Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Dickens: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misu…August 6, 2018 14:57

At one time I saw them as common values, but now know well they're not, so I'm glad to help nudge them along, even if just a little.August 3, 2018 15:17

Here's an example of moving stripe-go's test suite over to use it: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go/pull/628August 1, 2018 17:08

Go integrations on 1.6+ will start using HTTP/2 automatically. Upgrade stripe-php to get it. Support in other languages is more complex, but coming.August 1, 2018 17:06

I’ve never felt that as strongly as reading this thread on the Metreon.

Test suites are slow because their progenitors were sloppy, not because they have to be.July 27, 2018 20:09

“Do one for me,” Yossarian requested.

(And very excited to say that we'll have full support for Issuing across Stripe client libraries in seven languages and in stripe-mock on day one.) https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/10225435243344…July 26, 2018 18:48

Good: used credit card fringe benefit for phone damage, and after some bureaucracic navigation, they paid. Apple botched repair, so I ended up with a new phone ~8 months after purchase.

Excellent end user experience — 10x better than anything else and 100x better than most.July 19, 2018 01:26

As per Dan Carlin's usual, it's excellent work.

(Seen through the smoke kicked up by yet another wildfire raging through California.) https://t.co/hzVaF29bihJuly 17, 2018 14:18

I miss email.July 12, 2018 17:54

Other books on the subject tend to contain (1) too much mysticism, and (2) too many words (more is said than necessary to reach book length). This short book is neither; it's practical and concise.

Four different mechanisms for authentication, none general. OAuth 2 supported, but only for appearance's sake — OAuth 1 still needed to say, post a tweet. Kafka would be proud. https://t.co/CLDZumY6AxJuly 6, 2018 15:45

“This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.”

(Bash (or sh, zsh, etc.) is objective garbage as a programming language, but it’s garbage that’s ubiquitous, and that’s valuable. Just don’t let a Bash program grow beyond trivial size or you’ll pay for that low bar to entry later — in blood and tears.) https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/101183526…June 27, 2018 06:14

Miyamoto attributes his creativity to being surrounded with nature when he was young. The story begins and ends with stumbling on a cave.

Reading between the lines, I suspect that if there were a lot of large serverless deployments out there, we'd be seeing many more data points, and more notable ones too.

I'm still thinking about "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" months after finishing it — surely the sign of a great book.June 20, 2018 16:23

Still, I thought it was cool. https://t.co/qWu7DoWfQqJune 12, 2018 16:07

Migration guide: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go/blob/master/v3…June 6, 2018 18:02

Tools like this exist, and yet companies pay real money for Confluence. Enterprise software is total madness.June 5, 2018 19:31

The boring facades you see along a street often don’t give you a feel for the quiet oases out back. https://t.co/9Z9S0IILT6June 4, 2018 17:25

Sometimes the venue really helps make a show, and Leipzig is full of big, old, interesting places. Seeing one here is like what it would have felt like to hold a rock concert in an ancient Roman temple (but with a sound system from 2018). https://t.co/C0yaezMTtzMay 22, 2018 03:29

Calling DataLoader (the usual implementation) just “inelegant” is generous. This looks to be much better.

This is really close to what an optimal city should look like: dense residential surrounded by lots of natural space. Minimal roads. No parking lots. https://t.co/KZ0xE2NcS7May 21, 2018 05:20

Not pictured: piglets scurrying around in the background. Boss boar so big that he might know a thing of two about the assassination of Robert Baratheon. https://t.co/fq79Q3Ixr2May 20, 2018 12:22

(Morning runs here are a little more interesting than home.) https://t.co/KQrPbq8QUoMay 19, 2018 12:06

(And imagine how many hundreds of editions of this book have been printed since it was published in ‘49.) https://t.co/gfTfKFSiJyMay 16, 2018 16:20

Between that, Result from main, 128 bit integers, and async/await in sight, Rust stays the most exciting happening in software, by far.May 10, 2018 18:41

Be a good citizen: don't throw half-baked software over the fence.May 10, 2018 16:08

These “Forest of Liars” renderings are some of them. Absolutely gorgeous. https://twitter.com/sylvainsarrailh/status/9938374…May 8, 2018 20:38

There’s still many advances to be made in interface design, and they’re closer to home than we expect.April 29, 2018 19:56

A lot of thought has gone into this feature — not just in algorithmic efficiency, but space efficiency (radix tree + only one bit is used if an item's fields match its predecessor's), usability (consumer groups), and testing.April 26, 2018 14:24

All content online gets mixed together, and the asymptote of its perceived value is zero. 280 characters will be ever more normal as target content length.

With `time`, if user > real, you're seeing time spent on multiple cores.

For a big project, incremental is on par with a fast Ruby test suite, a fraction of a normal one, or an infinitesimal slice of a degenerate megasuite (found at Big Ruby shops).April 20, 2018 11:56

1. Dr…April 18, 2018 02:03

(Probably don't use interpreted languages beyond scripting, but) Python is really moving.

Here’s a tiny spark of a thought on baking resilience into online services. The 500 test: https://brandur.org/fragments/the-500-testApril 13, 2018 16:00

Strong conventions, introspection (GraphiQL is amazing), and improved change resilience (explicit field requests). You can still design great APIs minus the mystique/dogmatism of REST.April 5, 2018 13:26

Any code that ossifies after being first written is almost certainly bad code.April 3, 2018 13:12

It’s the most minute luxury in life. When you have access to it, you think nothing of it. When you don’t, you miss it dearly.April 1, 2018 09:11

No project gets everything right, but Rust (and its great core + community) has consistently been more right than anything else.March 23, 2018 21:53

Database contraints are the only way to move from hoping data is valid to *knowing* it is. Use them. Don't use a database without them.

You see countless of these in a day:

There's nothing quite like tests that are 90% mocks and succeed at nothing but testing a specific internal implementation.March 15, 2018 17:25

The only service I miss is ACM — zero-hassle HTTPS is *such* a killer feature. A Kubernetes/Let's Encrypt Rube Goldberg machine just isn't the same.March 13, 2018 00:39

Tragedy of the commons plays a big part — it’s easier to slather on a new layer of mud than to go back and apply a fix to the core, and future maintenance is everybody’s problem.March 8, 2018 18:02

(And wow, what a beautiful game.)March 2, 2018 13:51

Languages need a user space that lets them be used effectively even without understand every nuance of the type and concurrency systems along with all other implementation details.March 1, 2018 16:56

Docs are rich in type annotations, but useless. `examples` dirs are a great idea, but almost always trivial.March 1, 2018 16:54

Bad habits are on autopilot, but good ones, even if you have them going for weeks, easily turn one missed day turns into two, then three, and before you know it, are gone.February 26, 2018 18:26

Input is received, parsed and validated, *then* you acquire a conn. DB ops are run, and it's released before encoding and sending a response.February 21, 2018 16:54

N workers can plausibly share << N connections. https://github.com/sfackler/r2d2February 21, 2018 16:54

(Don't put too much stock in benchmarks, but this is pretty cool.)

This is what I like about Go — you don't need a flashy new language feature to cut a release.

Here's my Rust service's memory use over ~5 hours running a periodic workload. The footprint is tiny, and baseline so flat that you could us it as a level. https://t.co/3mvXJu8LGCFebruary 14, 2018 15:15

1. Cross-compiling is still hard because of OpenSSL and libpq (good for Go for jettisoning them).

Lots of cool technologies to get there including cross-compilation to a musl target, multi-stage Docker build with a final tiny ~12 MB Alpine-based image, and binary-embedded Diesel migrations. https://t.co/2hxkdve1HyFebruary 11, 2018 23:08

The old model of buying a CD for a few songs was pretty broken, but the new one seems to be too.

It's a new idea to offer integrated package and SDK version management as a core part of a language's distribution. When you've seen the light (e.g., Rust), it's hard to go back.February 9, 2018 20:26

I am so spoiled by `rustup`.February 9, 2018 20:22

With stylistic concerns automated away with Rustfmt, the linter's job becomes one to catch real problems. Clippy is so good at it that I was actually learning better Rust by fixing its warnings.

Many, many before them, didn't.February 7, 2018 21:55

Reading someone else's code, or your own a year from now, you *always* wish that they/you'd taken the time to type a few extra characters.February 7, 2018 21:55

The former slows you down and latter exhausts you. This reason alone is why public APIs with non-negligible users should have only one version.February 6, 2018 17:24

Sustained use pricing is also more user-friendly than reserved instances — true elastic computing minus capital costs and math.

This is exactly how styling tools should be built: strong default conventions, but changeable via a conf file that's checked in with the project. https://t.co/0AQrPhkRFlFebruary 5, 2018 16:01

I’m happy with how it ended up, but what a great concept!

Congrats @petervgeoghegan! https://twitter.com/petervgeoghegan/status/9595127…February 2, 2018 21:45

(PCI providers need to start shedding requests come June to stay compliant, so it's for real this time.)

(It’s also really nice to see hard science-fiction bubble to the top of the popular culture every once in a while.) https://t.co/v9kmwITDtbJanuary 29, 2018 15:44

Used correctly, they convey superhuman ability to climb stairs at double speed. In reality, people stand on them. Getting between floors is half as fast, but we can be five times as lazy.January 26, 2018 18:05

There’s an argument for “responsible” Ruby, but a programming language that lets this happen is not a good one.January 24, 2018 16:07

My mistake. By way of apology, I've attached some beautiful Pascal syntax for admiration. https://t.co/yi8CkXd2zaJanuary 18, 2018 03:17

What will the end of cryptomania look like?January 17, 2018 15:13

Maybe it's just me, but supporting a custom PHP-like lang/VM forever, ~alone, is such a morose idea, even if you're Facebook. OSS is good. Shared community effort is even better.

The Rust philosophy would be “no”, but the more pragmatic answer (and embodied by the likes of Go and Swift) is “yes”.January 16, 2018 08:49

So much is amazing, but my god, I spent two hours today trying to figure out how to make a trait imply cloneable (and failed — see E0038). This is pretty normal, with huge swaths of time getting sunk into problems that are appallingly uninteresting.January 16, 2018 08:47

(Rust) A control thread injects work and workers receive it by channel. Control waits for them to join after it finishes sending work and the channel closes automatically (and safely) as it `Drop`s from scope.

(Pictured: Salesforce Tower and the Financial District from Tank Hill.) https://t.co/plQKPi2D3PJanuary 9, 2018 16:36

(Unfortunately, it'll be hard to prove.)January 3, 2018 08:49

Every line is a new death struggle with the compiler, but once that's done, you're done — the runtime confidence is freeing, even compared to other compiled languages like C#/C++/Go (Haskell is comparable, but less sane).January 3, 2018 08:48

(Calgary, hovering between -25C and -33C, has reached a special kind of cold.) https://t.co/UvvvCr1SzbDecember 30, 2017 18:18

Totally beautiful. https://t.co/DZuHBmYRYyDecember 29, 2017 20:16

Excellent so far — especially the configurable background noise. You’re not always in a quiet environment, and ambient noise can be a big help for focus. https://t.co/HQ3NhPebr9December 24, 2017 05:03

I’ll explain the concept of data types and typed schemas right after I’m through explaining the concept of irony.December 23, 2017 19:01

Better for big projects, _way_ better for small and medium-sized projects.December 21, 2017 20:41

Especially the tags.December 21, 2017 20:41

120,000+ employees at Apple and no one jogs?December 20, 2017 06:08

Flying cars, a moon base, and world peace have been frustratingly elusive, but the future has yielded amazing lighting technology beyond what anyone could have dreamt even as late as the 80s. https://t.co/j1MtONmLosDecember 18, 2017 08:49

Despite Docker, containers, and Kubernetes, the world is still looking for a deployment and operational experience on par with Heroku in mid-2011. There's lots of room to grow.December 13, 2017 06:34

It seems to land in the bucket of features that many designers like, but which is strictly worse for legibility; another example being low contrast font colors.December 8, 2017 13:10

Some blame the programmer and/or QA, but the problem was an unchecked pass-by-ref in a function that looks like it should return its result. Once again, the real culprit is a dangerous programming language.December 8, 2017 02:14

My first camera phone, a Motorola Krzr, took 2 megapixel images and they were *terrible*. These days, my dedicated camera is harder to justify every year.December 7, 2017 14:24

If you have a lot of users on Macs, this ~2 line change might be easiest design win you ever make. https://t.co/qXyuQT7Z1FDecember 6, 2017 14:31

The iPhone X’s OLED and bigger screen makes it even better. iBooks night theme looks amazing.December 6, 2017 14:04

Seriously though. I thought it’d be cheap, but the build quality and attention to detail on this thing is amazing. Half expecting it to step off the lot. https://t.co/znDecXwBVxDecember 4, 2017 09:09

In these “Lucky Yebisus” the lucky god has an extra fish: look for the tail in the basket on the very left.

Located on Tokyo’s artificial island Odaiba, also notable for having a 1:1 scale model of a Gundam. https://t.co/TZKwBmxl9ADecember 3, 2017 16:53

So much to look at. Downloading talks for the flight back to SF (and on that note, still love `youtube-dl`).December 3, 2017 01:06

In Tokyo, you walk into a bookstore and pick any one of them up off a shelf. The sheer variety of products available in brick and mortar is hard to believe. https://t.co/y3zM2HBLnTNovember 26, 2017 17:30

(Tweeting just in case I’m not the only one because I’ve been wanting this for years.) https://t.co/g87IC92KmSNovember 24, 2017 23:20

2nd image: Tsuboyu, an ancient (and quite modest) bath house carved into bedrock. 3rd: eggs for sale to cook in the 90C water bubbling out of the ground. https://t.co/RJ6I38TO2WNovember 23, 2017 13:49

Pretty amazing watching these guys in action. I’d be happy to be half this good at anything. https://t.co/R7ludmUbFJNovember 22, 2017 08:34

The tower’s going to fall, but with so many incentivized in keeping it standing, it’ll take a sizeable tremor to start the cascade. One day this is going to make history’s greatest case study.November 18, 2017 23:08

I’ve seen academic papers…November 18, 2017 08:16

In places like Japan, they can go on for kilometers. Here's the area around where I'm staying in Osaka. https://t.co/1SfkN9yS85November 17, 2017 23:39

For example, here's Valencia/Mission in San Francisco. https://t.co/Jf9jgjY1WINovember 17, 2017 23:38

There are ~100 of these guys, and they run by just inches from you — by far the most personal wild experience I’ve had in recent memory. https://t.co/lxh0H9CgPnNovember 17, 2017 05:13

(And the piece is by James Turrell who did the skyscape at the de Young in SF.) https://t.co/pbL0bcxkVHNovember 15, 2017 22:45

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasmo https://t.co/K1eUKX0KT6November 14, 2017 07:52

There’s some pretty interesting history lying around the parks of California. https://t.co/TaTgGc0gDvNovember 11, 2017 13:50

(Having enough expensive vices already I have no intention of picking up any of them, but it's fascinating talking to passionate people who have.)November 11, 2017 07:03

It's titled "Passages & Glass": https://passages-signup.herokuapp.com/November 10, 2017 01:47

You can now benefit from the whole OpenA…November 10, 2017 00:43

The Redis download + unzip + make takes < 1 minute:

A little commentary and a unified log demo built on the prerelease branch: https://brandur.org/redis-streamsNovember 8, 2017 15:24

On the importance of nature for mental wellness with Florence Williams: http://hurryslowly.co/002-florence-williams/

Lesson: know how to find every setting on your camera.November 7, 2017 05:41

SF is slipping under and wishful thinking isn't going to save it — a serious congestion tax is the only way out.November 7, 2017 02:56

Design and quality is good on any continent, but in Japan, prices are good too — making it a smart place to shop. https://t.co/g9DSymi2oTNovember 6, 2017 06:11

One of the few books I’ve ever seen that can’t be had for a good price from Amazon, with a range of offers from $120 to $200+. Our trusty local Japanese bookseller has it for $55. https://t.co/pjd4TVPvMnNovember 4, 2017 14:25

Currently soliciting ideas for a George Bluth Sr. "And *that's* why — you *always* leave a note" lesson.October 21, 2017 14:31

All very simple improvements, but infinitely better.October 19, 2017 14:57

After a year, it's moved to a new log. When complete, the trio will be an archive of three years of sun and weather. https://t.co/ttaNIG4Ot3October 15, 2017 19:29

Today, I use a dongle like Ives Himself intended.October 15, 2017 18:51

What is surprising is that with its low-res display it also *looks* bad. Given their aesthetics-trumps-all mentality, quite out of character for Apple to ship this.October 13, 2017 13:24

Humanity will eventually take its environmental impact seriously, but it'll be far too late.October 12, 2017 18:08

(By their own admission, the city's progress on Vision Zero is ... zero http://visionzerosf.org/about/how-are-we-doing/.)October 7, 2017 03:16

Abolishing all inheritance is a hallmark of a great modern language. Nice one Go and Rust :)October 6, 2017 20:02

Perfect for modestly-sized apps who don’t want to shell out $100+ for basic Kafka.October 2, 2017 22:00

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15356641 https://t.co/A5LZHKZkf6September 28, 2017 15:50

This totally nails it. https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/912787813069…September 27, 2017 10:28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk https://t.co/Vw37xqdPHASeptember 20, 2017 04:09

Languages with self-implemented stdlibs are the only future we should want.September 19, 2017 17:29

As if the button wasn’t removed to make it look cooler.September 12, 2017 18:39

Possibly why people have trouble with Go dogmatists ...August 26, 2017 05:24

Async/await is a better model than callbacks or promises, but still forces code to be designed around it.August 23, 2017 05:22

Let the marketing prowess of Bitcoin people never be in doubt.August 1, 2017 15:02

https://www.mongodb.com/scale/relational-vs-non-re… https://t.co/pVISVIlt3PJune 20, 2017 18:51

Turns out the people talking about database atomicity in the 70s were onto something.May 31, 2017 16:12

`..` vs `…` was always unintuitive at best, and dangerous at worst.

@brandur https:…May 23, 2017 05:03

In practice: configuration nightmare.April 20, 2017 18:29

But then someone fact checked.

Total catastrophe isn’t a question of if, but when.February 28, 2017 17:15

(I went with Ctrl+C after all.)November 19, 2016 18:21

But seriously, I hope good alternatives appear before I end up rolling my own NaCL-based vault.August 28, 2016 15:17

Features a great new design, fast XHR loading, rich code snippets, and contextual API keys.August 18, 2016 16:55

Who could’ve known that putting up “we live here” ads in SOMA wouldn’t be an effective speed deterrent!June 23, 2016 06:02

Vision Zero is just a hair’s breadth out of reach!June 23, 2016 06:02

Next up Apple will be announcing the revival of the <marquee> tag.June 13, 2016 18:37

Brought to you by @michaelvillar and @romainhuet.April 19, 2016 01:41

King of Kings, episode II. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-57-kings…March 20, 2016 18:34

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette_(wa… https://www.flickr.com/photos/brandurleach/2327408…December 6, 2015 21:43

(via @muyfine)November 9, 2015 18:59

Meanwhile we’re fighting to raise two blocks of bike lane on Market by two inches.October 21, 2015 17:11

(Have Tmux windows keep the same name you set for them.)September 18, 2015 22:24

@ here @ here ^^^August 30, 2015 04:26

Hello again Midgar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ4_t_GqGAM&noredi…June 16, 2015 15:18

Uniqlo → J. Crew.February 27, 2015 07:46

“A Generation Lost in the Bazaar”

Imagine trying to sell that one in North America.December 31, 2014 19:54

[OSX UI performance regressions.]December 24, 2014 05:55

(I kind of like it.)November 13, 2014 07:57

Wins: Nice background photo.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!August 28, 2014 06:13

Introducing NY pedestrian etiquette: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/nyregion/think-y…August 2, 2014 20:29

“Why Docker? Why Not Chef?” http://blog.relateiq.com/why-docker-why-not-chefMarch 16, 2014 02:15

As a technologist, I wish they hadn't dragged computers into it, but what can you do.February 24, 2014 08:45

You won't hear me complaining that Mulholland Drive is too weird again anytime soon.January 25, 2014 16:46

git checkout `git rev-list -n 1 --before="2010-12-07 13:37" master`October 17, 2013 03:45

`curl http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/159092`August 30, 2013 03:59

(For non-Calgarians, it's fast city-wide wifi)May 15, 2013 20:18

Spoilers! http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/09/ups…May 9, 2013 15:28

-- The Diamond AgeMay 8, 2013 02:35

But now I'll never know whether I would've taken the top stop on that Strava segment.March 21, 2013 07:59

SYMBOLS = %i[conditions limit offset]March 8, 2013 17:06

VPN + Irssi + Perl plugin + SSH RemoteForward + Growl.February 12, 2013 00:15

SoT down. WoT down. Now all I can do is hope that GoT will get an ending.February 9, 2013 19:09

- DoctorowFebruary 9, 2013 04:09

A great answer for anyone who doesn't install Flash or use Chrome. Works on Vimeo too.December 27, 2012 20:04

(Had to use Mail.app for something. It was frustrating.)December 18, 2012 02:43

(via Know I Know)December 4, 2012 16:26

I laughed.December 3, 2012 04:13

Makes sense, Rdio.October 26, 2012 16:51

(because apparently nothing in Runkeeper has improved in the last three years)October 7, 2012 20:21

(Thanks for organizing @demonbane + @danishkhan!)September 23, 2012 05:54

You could do all that, or go a bit further and learn Mutt, and you've got a good mail client for life.September 5, 2012 02:13

> Over the last thirty days we've answered about eighty thousand requests.September 3, 2012 17:31

Absolutely love it.September 3, 2012 07:39

Caps lock as Tmux prefix: https://mutelight.org/caps-lockAugust 19, 2012 15:48

(warning: metal)August 9, 2012 16:46

FYI Canadians, Nexus also qualifies you for Global Entry for quick access from countries that are not Canada.August 2, 2012 18:41

I’ll be proud to own an API that no longer returns XML.July 30, 2012 23:03

TIMEFMT=$'\nreal\t%E\nuser\t%U\nsys\t%S'

BBQ Dev Ops: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miekd/7532412420/in/p…July 28, 2012 02:19

ctrlp.vim >> Command-T.

The important part involving a `git rebase --no-ff` is near the end.July 9, 2012 21:01

Now I can tell exactly when Firefox starts chugging/devouring battery and kill it. Not so on i5/i7.June 26, 2012 21:43

But, lambdas + method chains in Java 8 are a perfect recreation of a product that has worked well for 5 years.June 25, 2012 04:13

+1 this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149130June 23, 2012 03:10

(via @exdevlin)June 19, 2012 16:06

@daneharrigan @leinweber @gorsuch @stolt45 were still steaming along at full power.June 15, 2012 12:41

A lot of advanced stuff on here about Vim and the like is downright hard to find out.June 9, 2012 14:33

Me: Ein Kaffee bitte.

That's it. The complete list of its positive qualities.May 30, 2012 16:05

(via @josephbreihan)May 24, 2012 07:23

(via @michellegreer)May 23, 2012 09:19

I pretty much come here for the music videos.May 17, 2012 06:28