/Entertaining

Shamir Secret Sharing

- Max Levchin tl;dr: “This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing.”

featured in #436

How To Be A -10x Engineer

tl;dr: "To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:” (1) Nullify the output of 10 engineers. (2) Create 400 hours of busywork. (3) Create 400 hours of burnout or turnover. And more.

featured in #403

Reverse Engineering A Mysterious UDP Stream In My Hotel

- Gokberk Yaltiraklileo tl;dr: “Hey everyone, I have been staying at a hotel for a while. It’s one of those modern ones with smart TVs and other connected goodies. I got curious and opened Wireshark, as any tinkerer would do.” Gokberk discusses what he found and how he got there.

featured in #393

Code With Swearing Is Better Code

- Jamie Zawinski tl;dr: “We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.”

featured in #390

The Worst-Selling Microsoft Software Product Of All Time: OS/2 For The Mach 20

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: "Because I’m not here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 hardware. I’m here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 software.... That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it. And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them."

featured in #378

Advent Of Code

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: An advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

featured in #371

Why Do We Call It "Boilerplate Code?"

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: "Why do we have the term “boilerplate code”? It comes from the peculiar interplay of two industrial revolution technologies: steam engines and hot metal typesetting."

featured in #369

Rendering Doom With Emojis

- Bruno Croci tl;dr: "Back in 2020, I had an idea of a simple project to render doom using emojis because of some other doom renderer I saw on Twitter. I decided to take it as a weekend project, and although it took me around a week and a lot of bad code, it works and it’s actually pretty interesting. I don’t think anybody wants to play the game like that, but it certainly looks cool."

featured in #359

Reverse Engineering A Cat Feeder To Boost Productivity

- John Partee tl;dr: "I had two problems it could solve: low side project motivation, and loving dark chocolate sea salt almonds way too much. I'm a codemonkey - Why not feed my monkey brain when I push code? I couldn't find a USB candy dispenser, so I figured I'd try a cat feeder. This thing rocks, and I'll show you how to replicate what I did."

featured in #358

Someone Is Pretending To Be Me

- Connor Tumbleson tl;dr: "So I previewed the document and it was scary. It was a document intended for someone to have a cheat sheet for an interview on how to act as me." Connor plays investigator to understand how this spam works. 

featured in #356