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BattlePenguin
Personal blog · penguindreams.org/blogsystemsprogramming
BattlePenguin is a personal blog at penguindreams.org about systems and programming. Since 2015, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 216 times, most often “The Philosophy of Open Source in Community and Enterprise Software”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
BattlePenguin Dot Com
Most-linked posts?
- The Philosophy of Open Source in Community and Enterprise Software3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-06-04
- Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-09-28
- The American Banking System Is Still in the 1990s2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-04-17
- Running Linux on a Modern MacBook Pro2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-03-02
- The Decline of OpenID2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-10-11
- Cloud at Cost: The Unsustainable Business Model2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-07
- Tech Culture Shock: From America to the South Pacific, and Seattle to Chicago2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-17
- The Death of the Mom and Pop E-Store2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-25
What Hacker News says?
> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol…
Comment linking /blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/
on “Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street”Submitted Why I Don't Sign Non-Competes as a story · 335 points
HN discussionI've written a similar article to this a few years back, so this isn't a new problem and obviously little has been done to fix it: https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made... I have SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, DMARC .. all the things, and yet I still get e-mail dropped. Will you guys fix Postmaster tools for small servers? What can I do to send e-mail to my friends?
Comment linking /blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/
on “Google Is Eating Our Mail”Submitted The Death of the Mom and Pop E-Store as a story · 117 points
HN discussionI really dislike password managers and there's good news: you don't need one to have unique password per site. A good password algorithm is very useful: http://penguindreams.org/blog/my-accounts-been-hacked-no-it-... The article is dated. I'd suggest a longer minimum and 2 factor for services that support it. The advantage is unique passwords that you don't have to look up.
Comment linking /blog/my-accounts-been-hacked-no-it-hasnt/
on “The Dropbox hack is real”Submitted There's an iOS device attached to my Google account and I own no Apple products as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI knew CS graduates who loved parsing theory and could implement some basic C compilers, and I knew some who didn't know what a SCSI controller was. You get out of your education what you put into it. I had someone in an interview in Berlin ask me to write a garbage collector. In CSC 202, our professor talked about using reference counts. Reference counts can get leaks if you have two objects referencing each other…
Comment linking /projects/graphmapper/
on “Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard”Submitted Password Algorithms as a story · 60 points
HN discussionI recent did a write up on the decline of OpenID: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-decline-of-openid/ It use to use my own identity provider quite a bit, but every website that use to take OpenID no longer does. OpenID Connect is just a modified OAuth and even fewer website that custom OpenID Connect. Stackoverflow dropping it pretty much put a nail in the coffin.
Comment linking /blog/the-decline-of-openid/
on “Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms”Submitted Running DC/OS on Small Digital Ocean Droplets as a story · 53 points
HN discussionWe already have self driving trains in much of the world. It's a solve problem and cars can't even remotely touch the capacity of a train line. Self driving cars are not a solution and yes, America needs to see a huge car reduction within the next 20 years to deal with gridlock. I've written about it before: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Comment linking /blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/
on “Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel”Submitted Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers as a story · 19 points
HN discussionYou can't have self-ownership. It's not remotely possible due to the safety considerations. Self driving cars need to have more oversight than FAA/aircraft. Even with self driving vehicles, America will still have terrible traffic. If anything, self driving vehicles will make things even worse, instead of America finally fixing its broken/non-existent mass transit system. I wrote about this a while back. Basically e…
Comment linking /blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/
on “Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel”Submitted How Google and Microsoft have made e-mail unreliable as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThere are solutions. Things like Patreon: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-yout... Patreon is interesting because they host no (well very little) content, and can help some creators with a tip jar (some make $10/month) and others with a sustainable wage. It's a more well though out Flattr. ..and the thing is, everyone gets the end creation. Supporters get some extras or behind the scenes or re…
Comment linking /blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-youtube-and-other-ad-supported-services/
on “Ad blocking is under attack”Submitted The American Banking System Is Still in the 1990s as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI hate having a secondary system just to get access to my accounts. I use a password algorithm. This ensures I have a unique, easy to remember (or derive), hard to guess password for every account: http://penguindreams.org/blog/my-accounts-been-hacked-no-it-...
Comment linking /blog/my-accounts-been-hacked-no-it-hasnt/
on “Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts”Submitted 4K KVMs: Frustration with Terrible Hardware as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMigrating e-mail is very difficult, especially if you're like me and decide to setup your own e-mail server. The biggest problem I had was my e-mail getting falsely classified as spam: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-... I've also occasionally found really old services that use my old e-mail account. Even thought I have the password, they still require e-mail verification; which can't be…
Comment linking /blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/
on “Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts”Submitted I paid $180 for Headphones that only lasted Two Years as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> I run Debian with minimal problems This. I love this about most modern PC laptops. Sometimes you get some driver issues like I did on this MSI where I had to go through a kernel mailing list and use some python scripts to extract the firmware from Windows to get Wi-Fi working: https://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/ But that was also a gaming laptop. Every Dell and HP I've purchased in the past few…
Comment linking /blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/
on “MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros”Submitted The Decline of OpenID as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor 11 months when I was backpacking, I did all my development on a laptop with 16GB of ram: http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/ Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8. At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon). I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ra…
Comment linking /blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/
on “MacBook Pro”Submitted The Philosophy of Open Source in Community and Enterprise Software as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI remember when the 2014 chance occurred. It meant my little script stopped working: https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-chan...
Comment linking /blog/discoverying-friend-list-changes-on-facebook-with-python/
on “Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation”Submitted OpenBSD, SpamPD and the Startup Bug as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIRC as a protocol is very outdated. If I log in at home and forgot out log out at work, I need another username. IRCv3 has a lot of enhancements that should move IRC out of the 1990s as far as a communication protocol, but there's not a whole lot of movement on it. I think FreeNode has some v3 support. We don't have a lot of developers dedicating time to this. I'd love to myself, because it's something the OSS commu…
Comment linking /blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/
on “Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications”Submitted Automating HAProxy and LetsEncrypt with Docker as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSo if they route everything through the same set of EC2 instances, that might actually take care of the SPAM issue. I run my own e-mail server and have run into that same issue of not being able to send to gmail/microsoft addresses (unless I contact the person via Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. and tell them to check their spam folder): https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made... The way most of th…
Comment linking /blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/
on “Helm: Personal Email Server”Submitted Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers as a story · 3 points
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