Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …
I fight a disease every day that is considered a joke by society
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
The big Cassandra vs Mongodb vs CouchDB vs Redis, vs Riak vs HBase vs Couchbase (ex-Membase) vs OrientDB vs Aerospike vs Neo4j vs Hypertable vs ElasticSearch vs Accumulo vs VoltDB vs Scalaris vs RethinkDB vs Kyoto Tycoon comparison. While SQL databases are insanely useful tools, their monopoly in the last decades is…
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…
Block chain is agnostic of any 'currency' and it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. This is a ground up explanation of why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the minimum viable block chain with all of…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
This is the story of a Bitcoin trade — the most financially impactful trade I’ve ever made in my life. It’s also the story of the…
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
An API is a user interface for a developer. Learn the best practices to make an API that is easy to adopt and pleasant to use.
There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
Carol Dweck was obsessed with failure. You know how some people just seem to succeed at everything they do, while others seem helpless, doomed to a life of constant failure? Dweck noticed that too — and she was determined to figure out why. So she began watching kids, trying to see if she could spot the difference…
I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.
Repository for personal website
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching…
I. “Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”…
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
It's normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement .
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
June 24, 2018 note: If you want to cite an example from the post, please cite the paper which that example came from. If you want to cite the post as a whole, you can use the following BibTeX:
