For the longest time, I believed that if smart people worked hard and grew up in a reasonably nurturing environment, success would come…

Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
Edit: I posted this on HN 3 and John Graham-Cumming (the CTO of Cloudflare) reached out and said they're looking into the issue internally 4. I'm grateful th...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The coronavirus outbreak can still be beaten, the World Health Organization said on Monday, insisting it was premature to declare it a pandemic even though it had the potential to reach that level.

China’s use of surveillance and censorship makes it harder for Xi Jinping to know what’s going on in his own country.

YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...

We live in interesting times. For instance, we are witnessing several extinction events all at once. One of them is the massive extinction of species. The other is the extinction of jobs. Both are …

I've had this blog post in one form or another of draft for several years now. I hesitated to complete it, in part because at the best of times cultural observations can easily be misinterpreted and also in part because of the role I had in working with many…

Sock knitters know this beast: Second Sock Syndrome. What can you do about it? How can you fight it or cope with it? Here are 12 ideas that might help you.

'Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing.'

Autumn has come and with it a successor springs As a quick recap or the ‘too long, didn’t read’ (tdlr) version of the intro to the Haiku Alpha series, Be had started life making its own software (B…

The story of water supply in the ancient Roman Empire is grand. The transport and hydraulic control of large quantities of fresh water was one of the factors in the immense, unprecedented success of the Roman Empire. The major Roman cities were located, in…

Andreessen-Horowitz has always been the most levelheaded of the major current year VC firms. While other firms were levering up on “cleantech” and nonsensical biotech startups that viol…

Request for Co-founder This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups. RFC doesn’t mean “Request for Comments” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts…