Blog
Will Faught
March 2016
Just automated bootstrapping my OS X programming environment. It sets up: Homebrew Homebrew cask Homebrew and cask packages Oh My Zsh Maximum Awesome That takes care of my terminal, shell, programs, and configurations.
bootstrap homebrew programming zsh
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New GitHub Reactions For Pull Requests, Issues, And Comments
Finally.
github programming reactions voting
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Fixing The Inequity Of Startup Equity
Stock options are valuable compensation for startup employees. The high potential upside of these options motivates employees to turn down larger salaries at bigger companies and work at startups. It seems obvious, then, to expect that employees should own their vested options outright, even if they leave the company. Stock options are compensation for work that’s already been done. Returning them to the company when you leave would be inequitable.
engineers equity programming startups stock
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February 2016
Great tip from Sandi Metz on how abstractions can worsen code: When the abstraction is wrong, the fastest way forward is back. This is not retreat, it’s advance in a better direction. Do it. You’ll improve your own life, and the lives of all who follow.
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A beautiful and heartfelt letter from a Civil War soldier to his wife shortly before his death: But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows - when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children - is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?
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Firewatch Available For Pre-Order
Firewatch became available for pre-order today. You can get 10% off on Steam.
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January 2016
Backdooring Your JavaScript Using Minifier Bugs
An interesting idea of exploiting bugs in code minifiers, inspired from compiler exploits.
javascript minifiers programming
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A very nice tutorial for transforming Golang ASTs by Tim Clark.
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An extension of the previously linked-to theory that shows there is an undiscovered passage to the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.
build egypt jean-pierre houdin khufu pyramid theory
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Dave Cheney: In my mind, of all the possible candidates that Go has removed, it is the removal of threads that will be its most profound contribution. This is not to say that Go programs do not use threads, any more than you can say structured programs are not compiled into branch and jump instructions. But Go programmers no longer have to concern themselves with thread management, or as Uncle Bob would say, Go programmers are restricted from directly controlling the thread their code runs on.
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December 2015
San Francisco Aerial Drone Footage
Aerial drone footage of San Francisco. Really interesting.
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Hide your wallets! The Northpole Noir Steam winter sale is upon us. I picked up 89 games: Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000 Anachronox Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures BattleBlock Theater Beat Hazard Binary Domain BloodRayne Brutal Legend Champion of the Gods Costume Quest Cthulhu Saves the World & Breath of Death VII Double Pack DLC Quest Darwinia Defy Gravity Disco Dodgeball Divekick DreadOut Duke Nukem Kill-A-Ton Collection Dustforce Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 Flame Over Gateways Geometry Wars Gothic Universe Edition Gran Vitreous Grow Home Gunman Clive Gunpoint HER STORY Hack ’n’ Slash Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy Heavy Bullets Launch Hexcells Infinite Hitman: Codename 47 Iron Fisticle Jets’n’Guns Gold Just Get Through LISA Legacy of Kain Collection Legend of Grimrock Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Luckslinger Magicka Multiwinia Murdered: Soul Suspect Nidhogg Store One Finger Death Punch Our Darker Purpose Papo & Yo Prelogate Quake Live REVOLVER360 RE:ACTOR Really Big Sky Red Orchestra Replay - VHS is not dead Retro City Rampage Risen Rock Boshers DX: Director’s Cut STARWHAL Sanctum 2 Serious Sam 3 BFE Serious Sam Double D Serious Sam Gold Pack Shadow Man Shank Shank 2 Shatter Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015 Sid Meier’s Pirates!
2 minutes
Where The F*** Is Carmen Sandiego
Pretty funny spoof with the artists that made the theme song.
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Why Star Wars Is A Political Force To Be Reckoned With
Zoe Williams, writing for The Guardian: By Attack of the Clones, three years later in 2002, the Jedi have a kind of UN blue helmets mandate – “You must realise there aren’t enough Jedi to protect the Republic. We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” says Mace Windu, apropos some urgent battle or other. Now we’re in a postmodern, post-heroism landscape, where good and evil still exist, but good is on the clock and evil has all day.
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Wine Tasting Is Bullshit. Here’s Why.
Robbie Gonzales, writing for io9: The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This raises an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit? There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint. Even more information about the fallacies of wine tasting and judgment.
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Apple’s Secret Plan To Boost IPhone Sales Is Working
Philip Elmer-DeWitt writing for Fortune: What they couldn’t foresee was whether Apple’s customers would see the benefits to the buyer. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, for example, predicted that 15% of new iPhone customers would opt for what is, in effect, a 24-month lease. […] For 24 relatively low monthly payments—anywhere from $32.41 to $44.91—customers get AppleCare+ phone support/damage insurance (a $11/month value) and the option to trade up to an iPhone 7 (or whatever it’s called) a year from now.
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The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across The Globe
Unsurprisingly, wine tasting is full of shit: In a sneaky study, Brochet dyed a white wine red and gave it to 54 oenology (wine science) students. The supposedly expert panel overwhelmingly described the beverage like they would a red wine. They were completely fooled. The research, later published in the journal Brain and Language, is now widely used to show why wine tasting is total BS. But more than that, the study says something fascinating about how we perceive the world around us: that visual cues can effectively override our senses of taste and smell (which are, of course, pretty much the same thing.
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Brandur: If you’ve ever run an app on Heroku, you may have come across log messages produced by the Heroku router and wondered about their untraditional formatting […] This curious format is unofficially known as “logfmt”, and at Heroku we’ve adopted it as a standard to provide some consistency across internal components. […] At its core, logfmt is just a basic way of displaying key/value pairs in such a way that its output is fairly easily readable by a human or a computer, while at the same time not being absolutely optimal for either.
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What Are All Those Weird New Skateboards And Scooters You’re Seeing Everywhere?
Great overview of all the new self-balancing scooters and hoverboards out there. I’ve never heard of some of these. The one-wheel designs seem safer to me, like the Airwheel. It’s still early days; time will tell.
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Sony Announces First Batch Of PS2 Games Coming To PS4 Tomorrow
“I’m excited to announce that starting tomorrow, you will be able to purchase and play PS2 games on your PS4 via PlayStation Store in the Americas and Europe,” SCE Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said in a post on PlayStation Blog. A total of eight “fan favorites” will be able for purchase, including: Dark Cloud — $14.99 Grand Theft Auto III — $14.99 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — $14.
gaming grand theft auto ps4 steam
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Fabric: Twitter’s Mobile Development Platform
Since the birth of mobile apps, we’ve witnessed an explosion of mobile development tools. Today, many of these tools still require countless hours on the developer’s part to implement: creating different accounts, configuring the SDKs, among others. With Fabric, you’ll never have to worry about tedious configurations or juggling different accounts. We let you get right into coding and building the next big app. Interesting. I would consider using this if I knew how to make apps.
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Really good interview of Steve Jobs while he was at NeXT. I didn’t know he had such strong views about education; they made sense to me.
apple interview next steve jobs
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November 2015
It’s that time of the year again. Hide your wallets! I picked up: AI War: Fleet Command Aliens vs Predator Aliens: Colonial Marines Bleed Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars Consortium Darksiders DeadCore Doom 3 Door Kickers Doorways: Prelude Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy Electronic Super Joy FEAR 2: Project Origin FEAR: Ultimate Shooter Edition GTA Collection Hard Reset: Extended edition Hitman 2: Silent Assassin Hotline Miami Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II Love Monaco Myst V Never Alone Neverending Nightmares Oniken Steam Store and Retail Key Painkiller Hell and Damnation Painkiller Overdose Painkiller: Black Edition Payday: The Heist Primordia Quake Quake 2 Red Faction: Armageddon Saints Row 2 Sanctum Shadow Warrior Star Ruler Super House of Dead Ninjas Supreme Commander Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance TIS-100 The Cave They Bleed Pixels Titan Quest Titan Souls Tropico 4 Unreal Gold Unreal Tournament: GoTY Volgarr The Viking Wolfenstein: The New Order It looks like I spent a lot, but it was all pretty cheap.
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A Cute Star Wars Easter Egg By Google Search
Search for “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”.
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Will Yager on Golang: I like Go. I use it for a number of things (including this blog, at the time of writing). Go is useful. With that said, Go is not a good language. It’s not bad; it’s just not good. We have to be careful using languages that aren’t good, because if we’re not careful, we might end up stuck using them for the next 20 years. This is a list of my chief complaints about Go.
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October 2015
An excellent explanation of how Git works internally. Simple and beautiful.
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They’re real and they’re spectacular. — Karl Marx
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Jim Scott at blackpawn.com: Pop Quiz: You have 765,618 lightmaps for a scene and very few of them have power of 2 dimensions, what do you do? If your answer was to rescale them and call CreateTexture 765,618 times please slap yourself. If your answer had anything to do with glTexImage2D, you might want to leave now. What you really want to do is smush them all into a couple larger textures, and this text will show you one way of doing it.
algorithms binpacking coding lightmaps
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Yelp Sues South Park For $10 Million Over Latest Episode
South Park doing what South Park does best. I would worry about it losing its edge if they weren’t getting sued. Also, WTF? Before being listed on Yelp we had no problem going around the country speaking to elementary school children about the dangers and consequences of masturbation. Now, with our poor reviews on Yelp, people are beginning to question our morals and ethics, like that is so important. Just because I have been arrested three times for public masturbation and each case was pardoned by the Governor, doesn’t mean our federal funding and government support had anything to do with it.
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Pretty neat weather report app for the terminal, written in Golang.
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What’s CoreOS? An Existential Threat To Linux Vendors
Matt Asay, writing for InfoWorld on the shift to minimal server operating systems like CoreOS: Linux vendors, particularly Red Hat, have built their businesses on meeting the needs of operations professionals. Developers, as I wrote recently, have been a secondary concern. That strategy worked great while operations ruled, but as developers have increasingly taken control, the ops-first strategy looks increasingly suspect. Indeed, Gartner estimates that 38 percent of total IT spend comes from outside IT today, and will balloon to 50 percent by 2017 as lines of business take more responsibility for their systems.
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HashiCorp on Consul versus Chef, Puppet, etc.: It is not uncommon to find people using Chef, Puppet, and other configuration management tools to build service discovery mechanisms. This is usually done by querying global state to construct configuration files on each node during a periodic convergence run. Unfortunately, this approach has a number of pitfalls. The configuration information is static and cannot update any more frequently than convergence runs. Generally this is on the interval of many minutes or hours.
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Consul Vs. ZooKeeper, Doozerd, Etcd
HashiCorp on Consul versus ZooKeeper, doozerd, and etcd: ZooKeeper, doozerd, and etcd are all similar in their architecture. All three have server nodes that require a quorum of nodes to operate (usually a simple majority). They are strongly-consistent and expose various primitives that can be used through client libraries within applications to build complex distributed systems. […] All of these systems have roughly the same semantics when providing key/value storage: reads are strongly consistent and availability is sacrificed for consistency in the face of a network partition.
consul etcd hashicorp zookeeper
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What’s the difference between libevent, libev, and libuv? Marc Lehmann on Stack Overflow: libev was created to improve on some of the architectural decisions in libevent, for example, global variable usage made it hard to use libevent safely in multithreaded environments, watcher structures are big because they combine I/O, time and signal handlers in one, the extra components such as the http and dns servers suffered from bad implementation quality and resultant security issues, and timers were inexact and didn’t cope well with time jumps.
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Things I Learned At JSConf.eu 2015
Thor Spieker, fellow Betable engineer, on his experience at JSConf 2015: First off, let me start by saying that this was my first conference ever, and also that I am not actually a front-end JavaScript developer. Day to day, I spend my time building back-end micro-services in GO for Betable, an online gambling platform. I only dabble in JavaScript when I need to work on our externally facing API, which is written in Node.
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“How To Get The Best Resale Price For Your IPhone 6, 6 Plus, Or 5S”
Great rundown on the options. It’s Craigslist all the way for me. I was surprised at how good a deal the Amazon trade-in program is.
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September 2015
Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg. Really funny if you’ve heard criticism of Comic Sans before.
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Can’t Discover The Sunken Truck In Far Cry 4
If you’re stuck in Far Cry 4 trying to discover the location of a sunken truck at the bottom of a river, watch this video to see how to use a glitch to do it (you fly with your wingsuit underground—pretty cool!).
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Can’t Loot Bunker In Far Cry 4
If you’re stuck in Far Cry 4 trying to get the loot chest in a locked underground bunker called Royal Vault III, watch this video to see how to use a glitch to get through the door.
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A Humble Proposition: How To Fix The Apple Watch
David Pogue on the shortcomings of the Apple Watch: On the Watch’s weird software layout, as noted earlier, apps aren’t anywhere at all. No matter where you start, you can’t swipe your way to the Home screen. The only way to find them is to click the Watch’s crown. OK, we could probably learn that: Clicking the crown is like clicking the Home button. Clicking it always opens the Home screen.
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Yahtzee On Everybodys Gone To The Rapture And Gone Home
Ben Croshaw on the problem with walking simulator games: Video games don’t have that very basic necessity - the ability to naturally control the pace of the story. There’s only so much the creator can do when ultimately the player is the one in control. If they had total freedom then they might just gazump all the way to the ending and miss boatloads of things that were all carefully placed to in some way pay the story off.
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