jvns
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
3,739
Submissions
214
Member since
Jan 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 months ago
From the other side, I’ve fairly often written blog posts that I don’t put much effort into and have no intention of reaching the front page of HN, only to see 12 hours later that somebody submitted it and it’s on the front page.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
Comment · 1 year ago
I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.
Comment · 1 year ago
I tried to grep the code for `api.` to get a sense for all the vendors this codebase is using, and which you'd need to have relationships with to run the code. Here's what I found:
payments:
https://api.paypal.com
https://api.stripe.com
https://api.taxjar.com
https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg
https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com
https://api.storekit.itunes.apple
https://api.iffy.com (AI content moderation)
https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
https://api.openai.com
https://api.easypost.com (shipping labels?)
https://api.sendgrid.com (email)
https://api.pwnedpasswords.com (haveibeenpwned)
https://api.worldbank.org (for purchasing power parity?)
https://api.dropboxapi.com (for "upload from dropbox"?)Comment · 1 year ago
Deleted this post because I don't think a random screenshot from my email is a good source for people to refer to. A better source might be the bitly terms of service: https://bitly.com/pages/terms-of-service (1.4 Destination Preview)
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes! Katie and I made it into a zine because I was such a huge fan of her work on https://ohshitgit.com/. (you'll notice she's a coauthor of the zine)
Comment · 2 years ago
That's a great idea, thanks.
Comment · 2 years ago
That book (Ed Mastery, https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed) is an April fool's joke, but it's a real book and I thought it was actually really good. I've still basically never used ed but it was fun to learn about and it helped me understand vim's history a little bit.
Comment · 3 years ago
fixed, thanks!
Comment · 3 years ago
fixed, thanks!
Comment · 3 years ago
Like I said in the blog post, I'd love suggestions for other things I've missed that happen when you run "hello world", _especially_ if there's a way to use a Linux spy tool to trace what exactly is happening.
Considering adding a few things that are happening in the kernel and trying to use `bpftrace` to trace them, but I need to figure out how to use bpftrace/kprobes and hunt down the relevant kernel functions.
Comment · 3 years ago
Hello! I wrote this post and I have a couple of things to say about this "DNS is not actually hard" take. It took me many years to feel totally comfortable debugging DNS problems, and I wrote this post to explain why I think it was hard for me.
I also used to think that "no, actually, it's easy!" was an encouraging response to "this is hard to learn". And I kind of get it! I love DNS! I think it is surprisingly simple in many ways, and I've written about that a lot, for example in https://implement-dns.wizardzines.com which shows you how to implement a toy DNS resolver from scratch in some pretty simple Python code.
But over the years I've learned that "no, it's easy to learn!", instead of coming off as an encouraging comment ("you can do it!"), often gets received as "no, it's not hard, actually the problem is that you're dumb". Like, I've been confused about this for years, and you're telling me that, no, actually it's easy? Not that helpful!
So I've stopped telling people that, and instead I put a huge amount of work into trying to understand _why_ people find certain things hard and work to help remove some of those barriers.
Comment · 3 years ago
note: it was available before, the only change is that now it's in a github repository instead of a zip file that you download from the website
Comment · 3 years ago
A DNS resolver is both a client and a server -- for example Google's 8.8.8.8 (which this is a toy version of) is a server (you can query it with `dig @8.8.8.8 example.com`), but also a client of the various authoritative DNS servers that it fetches and caches records from.
I implemented this as a command line tool because that's much easier to do in a Jupyter notebook environment, but you can also pretty easily transform it into a UDP server running on localhost and query it with dig in the same way that you would with 8.8.8.8. That's one of the bonus exercises at the end (Exercise 7).
I might end up bringing "convert it into a server" into the main content though because it's pretty easy to do and I think it makes the whole thing seem more "real".
http://twitter.com/b0rk, http://jvns.ca