Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 241 posts.
Wage suppression in 10 charts
Wages for typical workers lag far behind productivity growth. It hasn't always been this way and does not have to be this way. These 10 charts outline the historical context of workers’ wage trajectories, and what can be done to fix the gaping disparities.
PEP 0484 – Type Hints is accepted
PEP 3107 introduced syntax for function annotations, but the semantics were deliberately left undefined. There has now been enough 3rd party usage for static type analysis that the community would benefit from a standard vocabulary and baseline tools w...
Introducing OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive…
New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
Remembering the Case that Established Code as Speech
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
Errors are values
Idioms and patterns for handling errors in Go.
Data Backup Strategies: Why the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is the Best
A Backblaze survey found 54% of people know someone who’s lost data. Learn how the 3-2-1 backup rule can help prevent data loss and keep your files secure.
The Shareholder Value Myth
Shareholder-value thinking dominates the business world today. Professors, policymakers, and business leaders routinely chant the mantras that public ...
Concurrency Is Not Parallelism (2013)
Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
By 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test
will go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation if Kapor wins, or The Kurzweil Foundation if Kurzweil wins.
60fps on the mobile web
Flipboard launched during the dawn of the smartphone and tablet as a mobile-first experience, allowing us to rethink content layout principles from the web for a more elegant user experience on a variety of touchscreen form factors.
Why ninety-day lifetimes for certificates?
This is a historic blog post at this point. Please see our certificate lifetime documentation for the current status of certificate lifetimes. We’re sometimes asked why we only offer certificates with ninety-day lifetimes. People who ask this are usually concerned that ninety days is too short and wish we would offer…
Backblaze Vaults: Zettabyte-Scale Cloud Storage Architecture
Backblaze Vaults are not only incredibly durable, scalable, and performant, but they dramatically improve availability and operability.
The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons
Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox ...
Amazon Web Services in Plain English
It's named what? Figure out what Amazon Web Services should actually have been called.
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (1987)
“The Implementation of Functional Languages” is a book about implementing functional programming languages using lazy graph reduction, and it divides into three parts. The first part describes how to translate a high-level functional language into an intermediate language, called the lambda calculus, incuding detailed…
When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China
listen to the audio version of this article: This post is all about WeChat, but it’s also about more than just WeChat. While seemingly just a messaging app, WeChat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile operating system depending on how you look at it. Much has been written...
Signify: Securing OpenBSD from Us to You
I'm going to talk today about signify, a tool I wrote for the OpenBSD project that cryptographically signs and verifies. This allows us to ensure that the releases we ship arrive on your computer in their original, intended form, without tampering.
The Systemd Chronicles
There is a menace which is spreading like a disease throughout the Linux world, it is called systemd .
Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
Rwasa – A high-performance web server in x86_64 assembly
rwasa is our full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx . It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years' experience with high volume web environments. In addition to…
Python Extension Proposal 498: Literal String Formatting
Python supports multiple ways to format text strings. These include %-formatting 1, str.format() 2, and string.Template 3. Each of these methods have their advantages, but in addition have disadvantages that make them cumbersome to use in practice. This...