Articles by downbad_
88

How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016) (cancerworld.net)

4

Nuclear War Survival Skills (1987) (oism.org)

124

Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) (smithsonianmag.com)

2

Steve Jobs: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010) (twitter.com/techemails)

2

Larry Page: "I think we should look into acquiring YouTube (2005) (twitter.com/techemails)

2

The Descent to C (2013) (greenend.org.uk)

1

When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition (2019) (gkogan.co)

2

One local man's immunity to ticks could save us all (2015) (caryinstitute.org)

1

How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations (2019) (productivityhub.org)

1

Event Sourcing (2005) (martinfowler.com)

3

Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020) (abandonedspaces.com)

3

You don't need to work on hard problems (2020) (benkuhn.net)

2

SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020) (zachocean.com)

3

The Mystery of the Giant Clams of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean (2020) (dantheclamman.blog)

2

Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained (2020) (reuters.com)

6

The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones (2020) (mattruby.substack.com)

1

Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012) (righto.com)

2

I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017) (dewitters.com)

2

Your Idea Is Brilliant, Your Idea Is Worthless (KS Lesson #204) (2016) (stonemaiergames.com)

1

Building a Vision of Life Without Work (2015) (livingafi.com)

4

Evil tip: avoid "easy" things (2016) (yosefk.com)

2

Low-level is easy (2008) (yosefk.com)

2

In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis saved lives with three words: wash your hands (2015) (pbs.org)

2

Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure (2019) (figma.com)

11

How Fighter Jets Lock on (and How the Targets Know) (2014) (gizmodo.com)

3

What is the Fourth Dimension? (1884) (wikisource.org)

2

Wikipedia Is Up (2001) (archive.org)

2

A few thought about snarky answers on StackOverflow (2019) (cargocultcode.com)

2

Why I Love Coding (2012) (henrikwarne.com)

1

The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020) (humbletoolsmith.com)

2

Modern JavaScript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020) (turriate.com)

2

Black Pepper Won Europe from a Tastier Pepper (2016) (atlasobscura.com)

1

The Origin of Tweet (2013) (furbo.org)

1

How Spotify Is Killing the Open Podcast Ecosystem (2020) (singhkays.com)

1

mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018) (nature.com)

6

Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) (frankchimero.com)

3

The Shape of Rome (2013) (exurbe.com)

1

Vincent Chan: Inside PayPal (2010) (paulgraham.com)

2

Steve Jobs Interview – 2/18/1981 (youtube.com)

4

Joe Is Wrong (2009) (krampe.se)

1

I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) (nee.lv)

2

How to Destroy the Earth (2003) (qntm.org)

4

How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020) (thorstenball.com)

1

What happens when Bitcoin miners take over your town (2018) (politico.eu)

2

Why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance (2020) (tanelpoder.com)

1

The Stranger Who Changed My Life: A Short Love Story (2017) (rd.com)

4

50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat(2016) (npr.org)

1

The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe (2014) (realclearscience.com)

2

Employee #1: Reddit (2016) (ycombinator.com)

1

What data on myself I collect and why? (2020) (beepb00p.xyz)

3

When Historical Fiction Is a Crime (2020) (newrepublic.com)

1

Facebook confirms data-sharing agreements with Chinese firms (2018) (bbc.com)

2

Most of What You Read on the Internet Is Written by Insane People (2018) (reddit.com)

3

Will the US Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020? (2012) (livescience.com)

3

I assume I'm below average (2010) (sive.rs)

3

Tribes of Programming (2017) (josephg.com)

1

Controversial Programming Opinions (2012) (blogoverflow.com)

3

Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016) (chris-said.io)

1

The Expressive Power of Programming Languages (2019) (pwlconf.org)

1

Objective reasons to prefer Linux to Windows (2014) (github.com/nbeaver)

2

Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different (2013) (randomwire.com)

2

How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements and Statement Expressions (2016) (robertelder.org)

2

What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014) (wozniak.ca)

3

Mary Somerville: The Woman for Whom the Word "Scientist" Was Coined (2016) (themarginalian.org)

2

How does a gas pump know to shut itself off? (1981) (straightdope.com)

1

Ants decorate their homes with the heads of their enemies (2018) (nationalgeographic.com)

3

Climate change: the CO2 emitter you may not know about (2018) (bbc.com)

1

I asked an online tracking company for my data and here's what I found (2018) (privacyinternational.org)

9

91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018) (nationalgeographic.com)

1

Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell (1807) (uchicago.edu)

1

What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf] (ifca.ai)

1

A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development (2018) (meiert.com)

3

Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995) (newsweek.com)

2

How real are real numbers? (2004) (arxiv.org)

4

Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer (2019) (davidwalsh.name)

1

Amazon Almost Killed Best Buy. Then, Best Buy Did Something Brilliant (2019) (inc.com)

3

Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? (2018) (cjr.org)

1

Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend. (2013) (programmingisterrible.com)

3

To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017) (gkogan.co)

1

From Hooch to Haute Cuisine: A Nearly Extinct Corn Gets a Second Shot (2018) (npr.org)

1

Why is it important for a matrix to be square? (2018) (math.stackexchange.com)

1

Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013) (yosefk.com)

2

What Is "Electricity"? (1996) (amasci.com)

2

California bans private prisons and immigration detention centers (2019) (reuters.com)

1

Recursion got into programming: a tale of intrigue (2014) (vanemden.wordpress.com)

1

Ipley Cross – Why This Type of Road Junction Will Keep Killing Cyclists (2018) (singletrackworld.com)

2

Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) (dafoster.net)

4

Why Japan's Rail Workers Can't Stop Pointing at Things (2017) (atlasobscura.com)

26

Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018) (byorgey.wordpress.com)

1

Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014) (plover.com)

3

Questions to ask at the end of a technical interview (2017) (smalldata.tech)

2

Coronavirus and Credibility (2020) (paulgraham.com)

1

The Web is the Next Platform (1995) (benslivka.com)

2

I Became a Better Programmer (2017) (jlongster.com)

1

The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) (priceonomics.com)

2

Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016) (changelog.com)

2

Attacking Ruby on Rails Applications (2016) (phrack.org)

4

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don't have (2018) (aeon.co)

1

Stores Will Soon Use Facial Recognition without your consent (2018) (buzzfeednews.com)

2

Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019) (matthiasott.com)