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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
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JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases
JPEG XL has landed, but how does it compare?
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Should you use www or not in your domain? (2017)
For 20 years or so, there has been the debate over whether you should use www or not in your web site’s canonical hostname. So should you use www or not?
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Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
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Measuring mutexes, spinlocks and how bad the Linux scheduler is
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
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BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
BusKill is a Kill Cord for your laptop implementing a Dead Man Switch using $20 in USB hardware + udev rule to trigger your laptop self-destruct if stolen.
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Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity
I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper , but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone . I actually remember struggling to grok tla , and being happy that someone took the time to write…
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I use C when I believe in memory safety
I am using C for a professional project. I believe in memory safety. Yes, I'm a hypocrite, but please, let me explain.
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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. By myself. In the past few winters I had conducted experiments in cutting the amount of energy I needed to stay warm, with a focus on heating myself instead of heating the whole house.
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Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
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A new chapter – full-time working from a van in a forest
For many people, the year 2020 will go down as a moment in time of hardship in their lives but for me, the year 2019 was dramatically harder as it was the realization that a long-term relationship wasn't going to work out...
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The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
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Let's compile like it's 1992 (2014)
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
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The Python I Would Like To See
What I would imagine an better Python would look like.
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Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep , an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity…
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How to Get Good at Chess, Fast
Edit: This article on chess improvement was unexpectedly popular, reaching #2 on Hacker News and being linked to on LifeHacker. Thanks for your patience as I work through all the comments and emails I receive. There are many misconceptions about rapid chess improvement. In this post I’m going to lay out a simple but…
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PHP Sucks But I Like It
I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it
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AI is propping up the US economy
Plus how American professors are fighting back against the AI onslaught, a backlash over AI models in Vogue, and more.
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“News is what somebody does not want you to print – all the rest is advertising”
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
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The Marketing Behind MongoDB
Countless NoSQL databases competed to be the database of choice. MongoDB's marketing strategy helped it become the winner.
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The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix
Following backlash, AMD agreed to fix an MITM RCE I discovered in Ryzen Master. All in all, it took them over four months to roll out the fix.
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How I learned to program
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible…
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Use GNU Emacs
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
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Discipline Doesn’t Scale
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they'd write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who've worked it out. The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and...