Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
The story of how a couple of failed SaaS ideas and a bunch of ugly Less stylesheets turned into my life's work.
Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon
Update 29.01.2023: Adapted the code to work with Mastodon 4.0 and replaced linuxrocks.online by floss.social Update 15.03.2023: Thanks to @veronica@mastodon.online, this code now handles replies in a lot nicer way. You might want check out her solution too. Update 07.07.2023: Thanks to @cassidy@blaede.family, the…
What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
Whose Computer Is It?
Patrick Wardle highlighted a tweet by Maxwell (" Some Apple apps bypass some network extensions and VPN Apps. Maps for example can directly access the internet bypassing any NEFilterDataProvider or NEAppProxyProviders you have running "), sparking an extensive HN discussion on Apple's ham-fisted tactics (not unlike…
Unifying the Technical Interview
Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips…
8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
Introduction to Clifford Algebra (2006)
Clifford algebra gives a unified view of many things that otherwise would need to be understood separately.
YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
This article contains a list of the top 50 YC software startups (sourced from the October 2019 YC Top Companies page). It also contains aggregated statistics for valuations and back-end programming languages used. Values in this article are sourced, but I cannot guarantee their accuracy. Find me on Twitter…
Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter (2018)
TL;DR: A digital typewriter based on a Raspberry Pi and an E-Ink screen. The code/build instructions are available on GitHub .
Programming with RISC-V Vector Instructions
Perhaps the most interesting part of the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is the vector extension (RISC-V "V"). In contrast to the average single-instruction multipe-data (SIMD) instruction set, RISC-V vector instructions are vector length agnostic (VLA). Thus, a RISC-V "V" CPU is flexible in choosing a…
Continuations by example: Exceptions, time-traveling search, threads, and more
Continuations are the least understood of all control-flow constructs. This lack of understanding (or awareness) is unfortunate, given that continuations permit the programmer to implement powerful language features and algorithms, including exceptions, backtracking search, threads, generators and coroutines.
How to use FIDO2 USB keys with SSH
I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s…
What's wrong with social science and how to fix it
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
Query-Based Compiler Architectures
What a query-based compiler is and what they are good for.
Bye, Amazon
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
In episode 379 of ATP both Marco Arment and John Siracusa described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to macOS 10.15.
Old CSS, New CSS
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with. I’ve been taking for…
The Polygons of Another World
There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…
I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet
I'll try to leave the pulp in here and keep this as chronological as I can. In that spirit, no tweets were harmed in the making of this post.
Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
The Internet is a dangerous place in the best of times. Sometimes Internet engineers find ways to mitigate the worst of these threats, and sometimes they fail. Every now and then, however, a major …
Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
A horror story.
Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
Many of you are likely to have seen the post by Huixiang’s Voice on Medium showing that Huixiang Chen’s laptop contained downloads of most…