Top all-time · #1862
Kevin Burke
Personal blog · kev.inburke.com/kevinprogrammingcareer
Kevin Burke's personal blog at kev.inburke.com covers programming and career. Since 2011, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 146 times, most often “The Frustration and Loneliness of Server-Side JavaScript Development (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Burke's blog for posts on which testing methods find bugs, alternatives to JWT, criticism of Sails/Waterline, Reddit's Postgres use, and Twilio and San Francisco housing debates.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- One commenter called the Twilio HN-haters post an amusing summary; another said they could not agree more with the post on updating best practice; another stron
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Frustration and Loneliness of Server-Side JavaScript Development (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
- Six Years of Hacker News Comments about Twilio3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-27
- /kevin/dont-use-sails-or-waterline/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-26
- The TSA Randomizer iPad App Cost $1.4M3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-03
- Things to Use Instead of JSON Web Tokens3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-08
- AWS’s response to ALB internal validation failures3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-21
- /kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-your-code/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-05-17
- /kevin/open-season-on-virgin-mobile-customer-data/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-06
- Weird Tricks to Write Faster, More Correct Database Queries2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-20
- Profile Anything in Any Language in Under a Minute2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-26
What Hacker News says?
Not exactly what you asked for but this compares defects and different types of testing. Unit testing is one of the less effective ways of finding bugs. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-...
Comment linking /kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-your-code/
on “The tragedy of 100% code coverage (2016)”Submitted Going Solo, Successfully as a story · 638 points
HN discussionStudies have shown the two to have the same effectiveness rate at treating depression, around 50%. It turns out it is actually healthy to pass the blame. I'd suggest reading one of Seligman's other books, Learned Optimism, for more, but in studies of people in high-pressure situations (freshman year at Army, cold call insurance salesman at MetLife, etc), the most successful people are the ones who externalize (blame…
Comment linking /kevin/lectures-for-basketball-coaches-how-do-you-respond-to-failure/
on “Depression lies”Submitted CircleCI trusts 8 analytics companies with your source code and API tokens as a story · 508 points
HN discussionWhy is there a ?lobsters qs on the submitted url? Seems to load fine without: https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000...
Comment linking /kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000/
on “The TSA Randomizer App Cost $336k”Submitted The TSA Randomizer App Cost $336k as a story · 486 points
HN discussionyou can usually configure them, see for example http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#send... and http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#pro... The difference is Nginx sets timeouts based on the time between successive byte reads or writes, so for example if you have a 30 second timeout and receive one byte every 29 seconds, you won't trigger Nginx's timeouts: https://kev.inburke.…
Comment linking /slides/reliable-http/
on “So you want to expose Go on the Internet”Submitted “Invalid username or password” is a useless security measure as a story · 413 points
HN discussionReddit does something very similar. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-table... I think the important thing to note here is that there are lots of different ways to use any given tool that can fit your use case without being an atrocity.
Comment linking /kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
on “Scaling to 100M: MySQL Is a Better NoSQL”Submitted Things to Use Instead of JSON Web Tokens as a story · 376 points
HN discussionI'm in London for the Olympics and have been blown away by the BBC - from the usability of their website, the lack of commercials, the generally high quality of commentary and online material, to the 24 hi-definition channels of Olympic coverage live on TV in the flat we are renting. I wrote up some instructions about how to use EC2 as a web proxy here - http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/how-to-use-ec2-as-a-web-proxy/ -…
Comment linking /kevin/how-to-use-ec2-as-a-web-proxy/
on “I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?”Submitted Reddit's database has only two tables as a story · 296 points
HN discussionHere: https://storify.com/jcuid/thomas-h-ptacek-don-t-use-json-web... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13866883 https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/things-to-use-instead-of-jwt/ or go with the flow: https://www.google.gr/search?q=ptacek+jwt&oq=ptacek+jwt&aqs=... He has countless comments preaching against JWT and DNSSEC. Mind you, I know the nickname, I know he is good with sec (I'd hire him to vet an app) and all but…
Comment linking /kevin/things-to-use-instead-of-jwt/
on “Show HN: PAST, a secure alternative to JWT”Submitted How not to ask questions at a conference as a story · 163 points
HN discussionThis post is an amusing summary of the six years of Twilio haters: https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comme...
Comment linking /kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/
on “Twilio opens trading at $23.99 per share”Submitted Virgin Mobile leaves six million subscriber accounts wide open as a story · 156 points
HN discussionUp until 2 years ago, Virgin Mobile USA rate limited PIN attempts using cookies : https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/open-season-on-virgin-mobile-c... (VM USA was a VMNO, but now it's more of a Sprint brand, since 2009 Sprint owns them outright)
Comment linking /kevin/open-season-on-virgin-mobile-customer-data/
on “Snowden Documents Indicate NSA Has Breached Deutsche Telekom”Submitted Web Development in Go as a story · 139 points
HN discussionhttps://kev.inburke.com/kevin/invalid-username-or-password-u... Could not agree more on this. Best practice should evolve within time and wiki should be updated!
Comment linking /kevin/invalid-username-or-password-useless/
on “Authentication Cheat Sheet”Submitted Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research as a story · 117 points
HN discussionWhether it's a company launching a product or a developer showing off something they built in their spare time, it's really depressing to launch something you've been working on for months or years and to get back "well, X already does this." I'd add that "X already does this" comments like this are a routine feature of Twilio HN threads, as long as the company's been alive. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-o…
Comment linking /kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/
on “Twilio Functions – Public Beta”Submitted JavaScript string encoding as a story · 103 points
HN discussionWell the good news is I've written about this exact subject at length! I have seen JWT implementations at five or six different companies now, tokens have never been used for more than one use case. For each specific use case you'd actually want to use it with there is a better solution that doesn't involve JWT, like secretbox or HMAC-SHA256. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/things-to-use-instead-of-jwt/
Comment linking /kevin/things-to-use-instead-of-jwt/
on “How to Use JSON Web Tokens”Submitted Tips for designing your personal site as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI had pretty much the same experience with Virgin Mobile last year (passwords limited to 6 digits, no brute force protection). I finally told the guy I got escalated to that if they didn't do anything I'd call the NY Times, Consumerist, Gawker, CNET, Ars, etc and tell them about it. They didn't do anything, so I sent around the article and pretty much every publication I sent it to ran with it. After that they took…
Comment linking /kevin/open-season-on-virgin-mobile-customer-data/
on “Schwab password policies and two factor authentication”Submitted A Two Month Debugging Story as a story · 89 points
HN discussionA lot of the unaffordability is due to the high price of housing in the area. Here are some concrete steps you can take to help lower the price of housing: - The Brisbane City Council is deciding whether to build 4400 units of housing on 600 acres south of San Francisco, about the same number of units SF built in total last year. The Brisbane Planning Commission recommended building an office park instead. Contact t…
Comment linking /kevin/sf-housing-politics/
on “In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income””Submitted Helping Beginners Get HTML Right as a story · 55 points
HN discussionRumors of the demise of telecom services based on their competitors' feature set and pricing are greatly exaggerated. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comme...
Comment linking /kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/
on “Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes”Submitted Six Years of Hacker News Comments about Twilio as a story · 42 points
HN discussion
