24 January 2024

56 links ยท Wednesday

Startup Funding Simulator

Add investors, Safes and priced rounds, simulate how much dilution you will get, and know how much money you will make at exit.

The Story of Hacking My Air Purifier – Unethical Info

I searched the web for a deal on a decent air purifier and the Xiaomi 4 Pro seemed to meet all my requirements. The filter size, scheduler and air volume ticked all the boxes. I set it up and thought nothing of it until last week my room was lit with the ‘0% r…

Using abbr Element with title Attribute

How the <abbr> element is defined and exposed, along with the title attribute: § 4.5.9 The abbr element from WHATWG. ARIA in HTML entry on <abbr> notes it has no implicit role and naming is prohibited. Which is probably why Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.2 …

Short tech writing style guide for developers

Style guides are vital to successful publishing projects, but they are usually too extensive for casual contributors. After running a number of projects with developers rather than specialist documentarians as the main contributors, I've started using a short-…

AirPods Max died after 2 years

Apple might have found a legal loophole to charge users for hardware issues caused by software updates.

Interesting readings - January 2024

This idea, of writing a weekly(ish) post with interesting reads started of after reading Please, Own Your RSS Links. This is a post which could be summed up as

Design a Technical Interview

Last year, the company I work for was looking to hire a Backend Engineer. We wanted somebody who was a senior or on their way to becoming one. The Backend Squad was tasked with designing an interview to help decide who to hire based on technical merit. Above a…

Processing Background Jobs on AWS: Lambda vs ECS vs ECS Fargate

Discover how to leverage AWS Lambda and other serverless services for background jobs to boost efficiency and cut costs. This article dives into the nuances of processing background jobs in the cloud, comparing traditional methods with fully serverless solutio…

Treat Your Spouse As An Investor - SKMurphy, Inc.

Here are ten rules of thumb for treating your spouse as an investor in your startup and some tips on conversations to have before you commit.

Is Productivity Hacking the Ultimate Procrastination Tool?

Exploring the paradox of productivity hacks: Are they boosting efficiency or just procrastination in disguise? This post covers how the constant search for new tools can distract from actual work.

Xcode is too magic

Xcode is a great tool for beginners, but it makes it hard for developers to understand what's going on under the hood and optimize their workflows.

2023 letter | Dan Wang

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022) I. Walking The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers…

Context switching SPRs on PowerPC — Store Halfword Byte-Reverse Indexed

This post is a dive (well, more of a meander) through some of the PowerPC specific aspects of context switching, especially on the Special Purpose Register (SPR) handling. It was motivated by my recent work on adding kernel support for a hardware feature that …

Mac at 40: The eras tour

Happy birthday, Mac. I bought you a cake. Before I started writing my piece on the Mac’s 40th anniversary for The Verge, I was thinking of different ways to plot out the arc of the Mac’…

Is GIMP Forever Stuck In The Messy Middle?

I took a pretty rough swipe at GIMP last week, and rather than letting sleeping dogs lie, I’d like to explain my POV on the popular open-source image editor.

The Risks of Replatforming

(Or How Major Platform Migrations Really Happen) Many companies have replatforming efforts underway.  Architectures get old, new kinds of partners or integrations emerge, hard-to-maintain monolithic code gets broken into microservices, acquisitions force inte…

Why I Love Tailwind CSS

I’m a really big fan of Tailwind CSS, a framework for styling websites.

spontaneous studio, pilot

this is the pilot episode of spontaneous studio. in this series i'll hit record and just play, and whatever happens, happens. half hour minimum commitment, n...

Corax, Lucene, Benchmarks and lies!

When we started working on Corax (10 years ago!), we had a pretty simple mission statement for that: “Lucene, but 10 times faster for our use case&rdqu...

Publishing a Nuget Package the RIGHT way

In this video I show how to gradually go from manually publishing a nuget package, to publishing the nuget package using github workflows triggered by tags. ...

Trello API abused to link email addresses to 15 million accounts

An exposed Trello API allows linking private email addresses with Trello accounts, enabling the creation of millions of data profiles containing both public and private information.

Setting the record straight about Trello user profile data

Hey Trello Community,   We are aware of claims made by a threat actor about Trello user profile data. We completed an exhaustive investigation and did not find evidence to support that this data was gathered by unauthorized access. A threat actor, who was in p…

SerilogTracing

TL:DR: Check out SerilogTracing, a simple, minimal extension for Serilog that integrates with System.Diagnostics.Activity to provide hierarchical, distribu...

The ZK update conflict issue in multi-user applications

I haven't seen much ink being spewed on the ZK update conflict issue so I'll write a short note here. Let's take a step back. Zero-knowledge proofs allow you to prove the result of the execution of some logic. Like signatures attached to data you receive, ZK p…

Zero-knowledge proofs in stateful applications

Something that might not be immediately obvious if you're not used to zero-knowledgifying your applications, is that the provable circuits you end up using are pure functions. They do not have access to long-lasting memory and cannot have side effects. They ju…