Blog
Will Faught
September 2015
The Great American Phone Insurance Rip-Off
I never get extended warranties for phones or computers. I figure if there’s ever a problem where I need it, then I’ll wish I had it, and if it’s painful enough, I can get it then, but until then, that’s money in the bank. It’s been years. Extended warranties are a scam unless you have special circumstances, like you’re a klutz.
1 minute
Numbers Every Software Engineer Should Know
Jeff Dean: 0.5 ns L1 cache reference 5 ns Branch mispredict 7 ns L2 cache reference 25 ns Mutex lock/unlock 100 ns Main memory reference 3,000 ns Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 20,000 ns Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 250,000 ns Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 500,000 ns Round trip within same datacenter 10,000,000 ns Disk seek 20,000,000 ns Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 150,000,000 ns Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA
1 minute
It took me ten minutes and a Google search to figure out how to post a comment for a change in Gerrit.
1 minute
Go GC: Prioritizing Low Latency And Simplicity
Go blog: Go 1.5’s GC ushers in a future where stop-the-world pauses are no longer a barrier to moving to a safe and secure language. It is a future where applications scale effortlessly along with hardware and as hardware becomes more powerful the GC will not be an impediment to better, more scalable software. It’s a good place to be for the next decade and beyond. Really impressive goals. I love the idea of having only one GC “knob” to turn.
1 minute
August 2015
My iPhone just killed the Voice Memos app in the middle of recording. The moment is lost forever. What the fuck, Apple?
1 minute
“Federal Circuit Strikes Its Own Blow Against Overbroad Software Patents”
Imagine the Wright brothers, after they invented their airplane, filed for a patent claiming “a machine for flying.” Essentially claiming a machine for what it does rather than how it does it. This is known as “functional claiming.” Under previous Federal Circuit precedent, there was a very strong presumption that would give the Wright brothers the rights to any “machine for flying,” including things like the rocket or the Space Shuttle.
2 minutes
I’m on hold with Comcast, waiting for someone to help me. This loud, high-pitched saxophone jazz music is playing in the background, and every 60 seconds they play a loud ad about voting for my home town for some contest. What were these people thinking? Why can’t there just be a low beep every minute to let me know I’m still connected, and otherwise let me wait in peace and quiet?
1 minute
Notes On Distributed Systems For Young Bloods
A really great list of basic ops and engineering lessons learned the hard way.
1 minute
Looks like the excellent whatisthematrix.com went offline at some point in the past. Such a pity, it was a great collection of The Matrix production and related material.
1 minute
July 2015
Jack Bogle’s Advice For A Rocky Market: Follow Ben Franklin
Jack Bogle: When our financial system—essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers—put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80 percent of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system. As I note in the book, “the shift in our system from owners’ capitalism to managers’ capitalism has been devastating to investors.” The principles of sensible savings and investing are time-tested, perhaps even eternal.
1 minute
Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech At Wall Street Prices
Blake Ross: Wealthfront loves to paint itself as the anti-Wall Street, but it exploits the same achilles heel as its Manhattan cousins: Many people don’t have an intuitive grasp of the magic of compound interest, and so they certainly haven’t internalized the tyranny of compound fees. Then let us be clear: A 30-year old who invests $100,000 in his retirement with Wealthfront “for less than a night at the movies” will likely pay the company over $100,000 in fees by his 75th birthday.
1 minute
It’s Time To Kill The Monthly Fee For Small Accounts
Adam Nash: Unlike the many banks and brokerage firms that came before us, Wealthfront refuses to build our business by preying on clients with small accounts. It is why Wealthfront is completely free for investors with less than $10,000 invested and only a 0.25% advisory fee thereafter.
1 minute
Foie Gras Ban Proves Confusing, Hard To Enforce
He said he expects to see the same sort of back-door dealings that ensued during Chicago’s short-lived ban, in effect from 2006 to 2008, when it was repealed. There, chefs reportedly gave away foie gras and charged $20 for the cracker on which it was served. Clever.
1 minute
Knowing How Doctors Die Can Change End-Of-Life Discussions
The field of medicine is all screwed up by money.
1 minute
June 2015
He meant to say he didn’t accept the premise of the question.
finances financial advisor investing money personal finance
1 minute
Roth Retirement Accounts Are Very Overrated & Over-Hyped
I never quite understood until recently whether Roth or non-Roth was better for me. This made it a lot clearer.
1 minute
1Password Is Ready For John The Ripper
Time to crack 1Password passphrases by number of words in the passphrase: 3: 2 days, 17 hours 4: 58 years 5: 449,528 years 6: 3.5 billion years 7: 27 trillion years 1Password uses PBKDF2 to achieve this. They recommended four or five words per passphrase in 2013.
1 minute
Toward Better Master Passwords
I’ve been making my passwords all wrong. You can find Diceware here.
1 minute
The Steam summer sale has begun! Hide your wallets! Just picked up: Age of Empires II Alan Wake American Nightmare Apotheon Awesomenauts Back to Bed Bastion Battlefield Bad Company 2 Standard Edition Betrayer Steam BioShock 2 Black Mesa Botanicula Bulletstorm Bully: Scholarship Edition Child of Light Day of Defeat: Source Deponia Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director’s Cut (ROW) Doom 2 Eldritch Five Nights at Freddy’s Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 FRACT OSC Final Doom Goat Simulator Grim Fandango Remastered Guns of Icarus Online Half-Life 1: Source Hammerwatch Hatoful Boyfriend Hero Siege Hitman Contracts Hitman: Blood Money Insurgency Jazzpunk Just Cause Just Cause 2 L.
2 minutes
The Quest To Save Today’s Gaming History From Being Lost Forever
Kyle Orland on the challenges of preserving video games as historic art: Jason Scott knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the preservation of digital software. At the Internet Archive, he’s collected thousands of classic games, pieces of software, and bits of digital ephemera. His sole goal is making those things widely available through the magic of browser-based emulation. Compared to other types of archaeology, this kind of preservation is still relatively easy for now.
1 minute
Neil Hepworth reviewed Ancillary Sword on Amazon: Downton Abbey…in SPAAAAAACE. No, it really is. The novel is filled with tea, and fine china. There’s polite meetings in polite society. There’s blushing in abundance at the smallest of social faux pas. There’s tears from the young ‘uns when their jobs are just a bit too overwhelming. There’s snooty-as-hell top of society landowners with brat children to match. There’s tea. There’s gossip amongst the servants, and resentment amongst the slaves.
ancillary sword science fiction world
2 minutes
John Harris’s Science Fiction Cover Art
I thought the Ancillary Justice cover art looked familiar. Gorgeous work.
1 minute
May 2015
CBS Spills The Beans On The New Apple Streaming Service
At Re/Code’s “Code” conference on May 27, CBS CEO Les Moonves acknowledged CBS has held talks with Apple and that they would “probably” sign a deal to carry the network on Apple’s expected streaming service. Apple must be livid. No one has officially confirmed their rumored new service, and you can be damned sure Apple wanted it to be them. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
1 minute
For filibustering—for 13 hours!—the renewal of the NSA’s “authority” to spy on Americans.
1 minute
Go Is Unapologetically Flawed, Here’s Why We Use It
A critique of the Golang language, tools, creators, and community by Tyler Treat: I’m cautiously optimistic about Go’s future. I don’t consider myself a hater, I consider myself a hopeful. As it continues to gain a critical mass, I’m hopeful that the language will continue to improve but fearful of its relentless dogma. Go needs to let go of this attitude of “you don’t need that” or “it’s too complicated” or “programmers won’t know how to use it.
1 minute
Simple String Comparisons Not Secure Against Timing Attacks
Stack Exchange user cpast explains the security flaw in doing simple string comparisons for passwords and other sensitive information that enables timing attacks: The problem here is that generic string comparison functions return as soon as they find a difference between the strings. If the first byte is different, they return after just looking at one byte of the two strings. If the only difference is in the last byte, they process both entire strings before returning.
1 minute
50 Shades Of Go: Traps, Gotchas, And Common Mistakes For New Golang Devs
Kyle Quest has a lot of good tips for Golang newcomers, and arguably even intermediate ones: A lot of these gotchas may seem obvious if you took the time to learn the language reading the official spec, wiki, mailing list discussions, many great posts and presentations by Rob Pike, and the source code. Not everybody starts the same way though and that’s OK. If you are new to Go the information here will save you hours debugging your code.
1 minute
The Cultural Evolution Of Gofmt
An interesting overview by Robert Griesemer of the motivation for gofmt, how it has influenced code formatting in other languages, the things that went well, and the lessons learned. I found this point amusing: gofmt’s style is nobody’s favorite, yet gofmt is everybody’s favorite.
1 minute
Dave Cheney on bridging from one Golang interface to another: The value returned by io.MultiWriter is an implementation of io.Writer, it doesn’t have the rest of the methods necessary to fulfil the net.Conn interface; what I really need is the ability to replace the Write method of an existing net.Conn value. We can do this with embedding by creating a structure that embeds both a net.Conn and an independant io.Writer as anonymous fields.
1 minute
Jackass Further Destabilizes The Korean Region
Biggest dumbass in the world: I thought that my entrance [into North Korea]… illegally, I acknowledge… [could lead to] some great event happening… Hopefully that event could have a good effect in the relations between the North and South [Koreas].
1 minute
Changing The Size Or Case-Sensitivity Of A Sparse Bundle
A great resource for resizing sparse bundles in OS X.
1 minute
April 2015
Casey Liss on the Apple Watch: The Apple Watch strikes me as the next great frontier. In much the same way putting a computer with a built-in GPS in our pocket opened whole new doors, I suspect the Apple Watch will eventually do the same. I see that this is the future. I don’t doubt it. But is it worth spending, at a minimum, $400 today? I’m unconvinced. After trying a few on and using one a couple times, I find myself thinking the same thing.
2 minutes
A funny and perceptive take on the Go programming language and the Go team. In other words, Go represents a kind of Machiavellian power play, orchestrated by slow-and-careful programmers who are tired of suffering for the sins of fast-and-loose programmers. The Go documentation refers quite often to intolerable 45-minute build times suffered by the original designers, and I can’t help but imagine them sitting around and seething about all those unused imports from those “other” programmers, that is, the “bad” programmers.
2 minutes
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement. The main problems are two-fold: (1) Intellectual Property Chapter: Leaked draft texts of the agreement show that the IP chapter would have extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.
1 minute
In iOS Safari, open tabs often must be reloaded when you switch back to them, either because you were looking at another tab, or because you had switched to another app. This is mainly due to the rising memory requirements of iOS and apps, and iOS devices having only one gigabyte of memory for a long time. iOS will delete tab data to reclaim the memory for another purpose, and will simply reload the tabs later if you ever switch back to them; but if you don’t have a network connection when that happens, then the tabs can’t be reloaded.
2 minutes
Manhattan DA: Smartphone Encryption Will Endanger New Yorkers
Cyrus Vance: [Encrypted smartphones] cannot be accessed by law enforcement, even when a court has authorized us to look at its contents. The implication of this is that it’s going to affect our ability to protect New Yorkers. Replace “encrypted smartphones” with “private thoughts” and it makes just as much sense.
1 minute
Is Life Insurance A Smart Investment?
Damning of whole life insurance: For example, a nonsmoking 30-year-old woman in excellent health might be able to get a 20-year term policy with a death benefit of $1 million for $480 per year. If this woman dies at age 49 after paying premiums for 19 years, her beneficiaries will receive $1 million tax-free when she paid in just $9,120. … Do you really hate the idea of potentially “throwing away” almost $10,000 over the next 20 years?
2 minutes
10 Things Life Insurance Agents Won’t Say
Sounds like whole life insurance isn’t such a great deal compared to term life insurance and investing the price difference yourself.
1 minute
Ever wonder what the camera grid in your smartphone’s camera app is for?
1 minute
The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn’t Want You To See
George Lucas speaking about the importance of cinematic preservation to Congress in 1988: People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder.
1 minute
March 2015
Texas Finds More Lethal Injection Drugs After Almost Running Out
Why can’t they just poison them with carbon monoxide? You know, where you leave the car running in the garage and you pass out and eventually die. That seems like one of the best ways to go. Just knock me out and get it over with.
1 minute