Top all-time · #7626
Dave Peck
Personal blog · davepeck.org · on HN as davepeckprogrammingculture
Dave Peck's personal blog at davepeck.org covers programming and culture. Since 2008, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Why It's Hard to Choose a VPN Provider”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal blog of Dave Peck. The only HN comment is a bare link to a 2008 post, 'Meditations on Microsoft', shared in a thread about Microsoft cut-back rumours.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Dave Peck's home on the web. Dave is an independent software developer, investor, and civic technologist.
Most-linked posts?
- Why It's Hard to Choose a VPN Provider2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-04-17
- /2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-12-22
- Tdom: HTML templating with t‑strings2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-30
- Python’s new t-strings2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-16
What Hacker News says?
It's awful, and it's painful for everyone -- not just those using the DropBox APIs. The origins of these clauses are with iBooks and the Kindle app for iOS. I wrote about it in a recent blog post: http://davepeck.org/2011/11/04/kindle-clauses/
Comment linking /2011/11/04/kindle-clauses/
on “Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox”Submitted Python’s new t-strings as a story · 620 points
HN discussion> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/ )
Comment linking /2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/
on “Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch”Submitted Revisiting RSS as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI was there near the end. First, as a summer intern in 1998, and then in 1999 as a full time engineer on what is now Google's Mountain View campus. SGI had always been a dream company for me. I'd first learned about them in high school; now, right out of college, I'd somehow managed to land a dream job. SGI's hardware was cutting-edge and exotic. IRIX was killer (sorry Solaris). Cray was a subdivision. My coworkers…
Comment linking /2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
on “The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics”Submitted Tdom: HTML templating with t‑strings as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Comment linking /2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
on “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction ”Submitted Python's New T-Strings as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI’m not sure that Bitcoin offers any special insight here. We use email; it’s very much a crypto-less federated system that works at scale (of, more or less, every Internet user!) And there are newer examples: while it’s by no means a Twitter, Mastodon (and the broader ActivityPub universe) is already at a healthy scale. I collected these stats three and a half years ago; the ecosystem has grown substantially since…
Comment linking /2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
on “An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities”Submitted How I Host as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI suspect that, for less savvy potential customers (read: the vast majority of them), "That One Privacy Site" can do more harm than good. I wrote a bit about choosing VPNs, and about my concerns with TOPS, here: https://davepeck.org/2017/04/16/why-its-hard-to-choose-a-vpn... PS: Since this is HN, I just want to say that if you can, you should run your own VPN. Use Algo, full stop -- it's put together by some of the…
Comment linking /2017/04/16/why-its-hard-to-choose-a-vpn-provider/
on “VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs”Submitted Open Data: Messy and Great as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is unfortunate, but quite common. If you accept credit cards online, you're at risk. The specific kind of fraudulent behavior you see will depend on several factors (the nature of your business; whether you enable transfer from users to just yourself, or whether you push money from one user to another.) Credit card companies will, some time later, probably notice the fraud. At that point, you'll get a chargebac…
Comment linking /2011/12/01/dealing-with-credit-card-fraud/
on “Stolen Money on Gittip, Part 1”Submitted Tdom: HTML templating with t‑strings as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMastodon reports ~110k weekly active users and 121M "toots" across its 2+-year lifetime. That's impressive for a federated social network but, for comparison, 121M new tweets are generated on Twitter about every six hours. Some more basic Mastodon stats that I recently collected: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
Comment linking /2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
on “ActivityPub could be the future”Submitted Hacker History Bookshelf, Revisited as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote about how my experience with layoffs at Silicon Graphics in 1999 turned out, in retrospect, to be extremely lucky bad luck: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
Comment linking /2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
on “Getting Laid Off in Tech: The Myth of Upper Middle Class Security”Submitted Cyber Monday Music as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote an thing a couple years back. https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/ -- for me, anyway, RSS is still a key part of my daily work and leisure.
Comment linking /2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/
on “Ask HN: Is RSS dead?”Submitted I vibe coded a game with my daughter as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs a former MSFT engineer, you hit it spot on. When people are united behind a clear vision, amazing things can happen. When they're not... I wrote more about my experience: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Comment linking /2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
on “Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in”Submitted Why It's Hard to Choose a VPN Provider as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy first full-time job out of college was as an engineer at SGI in Mountain View. This is now Google's campus! It was the summer of 1999. You can imagine how it went. In retrospect, there _was_ a silver lining: https://davepeck.org/2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
Comment linking /2009/02/11/the-luckiest-bad-luck/
on “The Sad Saga of Silicon Graphics (1997)”Submitted Why it's hard to choose a VPN provider as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere are some trax I wrote for a recent laptop battle; in under three minutes they must get you grooving and/or destroy your future ability to hear bass. http://davepeck.org/battles-of-yore/ Fruity Loops.
Comment linking /battles-of-yore/
on “Ask HN: Do you create music? Let's hear it!”Submitted Samurai And Ideas as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a great list and seems to nicely complement a list of similar intent I posted a while back: https://davepeck.org/2014/01/02/hacker-history-bookshelf I love that Robert Noyce makes an appearance in Patrick's list; I feel that he did much to set the tone for entrepreneurship in the Valley.
Comment linking /2014/01/02/hacker-history-bookshelf
on “Silicon Valley History”Submitted Mountain Lion: "Today these APIs are a carrot..." as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI was curious about Mastodon's scale so I grabbed some basic stats last week: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
Comment linking /2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
on “Favstar will shut down as a result of Twitter’s API changes for data streams”Submitted Kindle Clauses as a story · 1 points
HN discussion