Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
Incident CVE-2026-LGTM
A series of unfortunate agents.
The Case of Richard Glossip
September 2015 I used to think the debate about capital punishment was a matter of abstract questions like when it is permissible to kill someone. In practice it isn't. In practice the problem...
MentalHealthError: an exception occurred
The programming community has been opening up over the past few years about mental health issues, so, I want to take this opportunity to open up about my...
Wireless Is a Trap
Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!" • Wireless protocols often silently operate in an extremely degraded state that makes them substantially worse than wired equivalents.
Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
Lessons learned from 15 years of writing SumatraPDF, a great open-source PDF, eBook, and comic book reader for Windows
What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to…
The Curse of NixOS
I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. On the other hand, it's…
The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
A recipe for reasoning LLMs
On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
Two Slice, a font that's only 2px tall
A font that's only 2px tall, and somewhat readable! Uppercase and lowercase have some different variants, in case you find one more readable than the other. Numbers (sort of) and some punctuation marks are included.
900 Sites, 125M accounts, 1 Vulnerability
900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)
(A true story.) Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get...
The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
Windows Defender is enough, if you harden it
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. You don’
Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI, Part 2
A guide to visual aesthetics, written by a nerd
Startup lessons
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
The Netscape/Microsoft browser wars in the mid-90's were really vicious and competitive. They really had it out for each other. Netscape had...