661
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 4,916 posts.
662
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
663
The Panic Status Board
This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!
664
665
MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3
In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…
666
JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation
Improve the start-up time of both small and large Java applications, with at most a limited impact on peak performance.
667
So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
668
Subliminal learning: Models transmit behaviors via hidden signals in data
We study subliminal learning , a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a "teacher" model that prefers owls. This same…
669
Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
670
The Inner Ring (1944)
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
671
SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
672
Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite
Discover the power of Snapdragon X Elite with upstreamed Linux kernel support. Explore areas of focus and unlock new potential with Snapdragon Linux today.
673
SQLite Begin Concurrent
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
674
Advanced sign-in security for your Google account
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
675
An Update on Plugin Security
Learn about Figma's response to the security vulnerabilities that were reported in a 3rd-party library that we use for plugin security
676
Notes on Programming in C – Rob Pike (1989)
What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules. I don't expect you to agree with all of them, because they are opinion and opinions change with the times. But they've been accumulating in my head, if not on paper until now, for a…
677
The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models
Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes…
678
How Beeper Mini Works
It’s a technical deep dive, so buckle up!
679
680
Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
681
Locking in WebKit
We recently replaced all spinlocks, OS-provided mutexes, and condition variables in WebKit with the new WTF::Lock and WTF::Condition — these new primitives have some cool properties.
682
Is soy a key driver of deforestation?
The world loses 5 million hectares of forest each year. What activities are driving this?
683
684
685
686
Mixing Swift and C++
Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns.
687
Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
By Nick Szabo, 2002
688
Peritext: A CRDT for Rich-Text Collaboration
Collaboration on rich text is hard to model with plain-text approaches. We review the challenges and how to construct a CRDT for rich text.
689
Ethereum Energy Consumption
The basic information you need to understand Ethereum's energy consumption.
690
Performance Improvements in .NET 5
Explore many performance improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET 5 runtime and core libraries to make apps and services leaner and faster.