Documentation for free, or, in-wiki issue tracking

Documentation often ends up in black holes - internal documents, issue trackers, test cases, conversations, commit messages, and wikis - where it goes unread. Focus on writing documentation that people will actually read, like product names, homepages, and inline help. 2014-08-13

Avoid using ambiguous pronouns like “it” in technical writing. Refer to specific referents explicitly to improve clarity. 2016-11-25

Prolog as a better alternative to “semantic triples” and SPARQL. 2014-08-24

The man command is used to access the UNIX manual pages, which are organized into numbered sections. man searches a predefined path to find the relevant manual page. 2017-01-30

Using unique error codes with linkable documentation improves error reporting. Provide a central error page URL with each error message. 2017-01-05

2018-09-13

foo.bar, foo.bar(), or foo.bar = baz - what do they mean? A deep dive into prototypical inheritance and getters/setters. 2020-11-01

Trick Android to display an SMS as coming from any contact. Convincing phishing vuln, but still unpatched. 2020-08-06

A “true or false” quiz where you respond with your confidence level, and the optimal strategy is to report your true belief. 2020-04-26

Simulation shows it’s rational to deliberately infect yourself with COVID-19 early on to get treatment, but after healthcare capacity is exceeded, it’s better to avoid infection. Includes interactive parameters and visualizations. 2020-03-14

A new phishing technique that displays a fake URL bar in Chrome for mobile. A key innovation is the “scroll jail” that traps the user in a fake browser. 2019-04-27

I got started with simple web development, but because enamored with increasingly esoteric programming concepts, leading to a “trough of hipster technologies” before returning to more productive work. 2019-03-23

Bob invents asymmetric cryptography by playing loud white noise to obscure Alice’s message, which he can cancel out but an eavesdropper cannot. This idea, published in 1944 by Walter Koenig Jr., is the forgotten origin of asymmetric crypto. 2019-02-16

Hacker News buried my post on conspiracy theories in my family due to overheated discussion, not censorship. Moderation keeps the site focused on interesting technical content. 2019-01-26

For decades, my parents have been working up to Flat-Earther beliefs. From Egyptology to Jehovah’s Witnesses to theories that human built the Moon billions of years in the future. Surprisingly, it doesn’t affect their successful lives very much. For me, it’s a fun family pastime. 2019-01-20

Gmail’s “dots don’t matter” feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails. 2018-04-07

OpenSSL’s inadequate documentation, confusing key formats, and deprecated interfaces make it difficult to use, despite its importance. 2017-12-02

I hate telephones. Some rational reasons: lack of authentication, no spam filtering, forced synchronous communication. But also just a visceral fear. 2017-11-08

Businesses often tout “free” services, but the real costs come in terms of time, thought, and typing required from users. Reducing these “Three Ts” is key to improving sign-up flows and increasing conversions. 2017-10-26

Granddad died. The unspoken practice of death-by-dehydration in the NHS. The Liverpool Care Pathway. Assisted dying in the UK. The importance of planning in end-of-life care. 2017-05-19

A C function to create a new process, set up its standard input/output/error pipes, and return a struct containing the process ID and pipe file descriptors. 2017-02-17

Syntax highlighters make value judgments about code. Most highlighters judge that comments are cruft, and try to hide them. Most diff viewers judge that code deletions are bad. 2014-05-11