nikhil.io

forty-one things tagged “technology

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially des…

Users hate change

by @sleepyfox on Github

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly: Humans naturally resist change Your change is for the better Customers should just get used to…

A List of Hacker News ‘Classics’

When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many o…

On Security Through Obscurity

Security by Obscurity is when you hide how a security measure works, not when you keep some part of it a secret. Daniel Miessler, “No, Moving Your SSH Port Isn’t Security by Obscurity” As a former sysadmin (but no expert on security): This should be read and re-read. After which one should take…

Robot Party

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…

Tampography

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on all…

Tim Kendall testifies

to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Facebook’s engagement practices and likens them to time-tested strategies used by Big Tobacco before they were somewhat regulated. And he would know. Kendall was the former “Director of Monetization” at Facebook and is currently the CEO of Moment, a c…

Computers Are Fast

A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second. If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :) and A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x fast…

Hugo Migration

Gave Hugo a try and was quite impressed by the ease and speed. The official documentation kinda sucks at introducing key ideas (like taxonomies) in a gradual way that’s helpful to newcomers, but is great for variable and function references. Found these two posts very helpful. Here’s another that ex…

Letters to a Computer

The Des Moines Register on how to send them email in (I’m guessing) the late 80s/early 90s. An article on how Baud Rate isn’t the same as Bit Rate Baud rate refers to the number of signal or symbol changes that occur per second. A symbol is one of several voltage, frequency, or phase changes. NRZ…