Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that…
The other day I got to chatting with a lovely woman who reached out after reading my blog. She was interested in talking about an idea she had, how she might get it off the ground, and if I might …
You may be concerned that the NSA is reading your e-mail. Is there really anything you can do about it though? After all, you don’t really want to move off of GMail / Google Apps. And no plac…
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
I’m just a student in a field unrelated to computer science , but I’ve been coding for years as a hobby. So, when I saw the current state of infinite scroll , I thought perhaps I could do something to improve it. I’d like to share what I came up with.
Interviewer: Now comes the part of the interview where we ask a question to test your creative thinking ability. Don’t think too hard about it, just
A couple of days ago I encountered this article: How Shazam WorksThis got me interested in how a program like Shazam works… And more importantly, how hard is...
About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. A…
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
We started a computer company!!! The Oxide Computer Company started in my garage, this is a story about its origins.
There is a moment, immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent.
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
A static site to link people to when their code is displaying Japanese wrong.
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
I keep coming across people who consider parser technology a forbidding, scary field of programming. This is nonsense—a small parser can be very, very simple , and provide a wholesome exercise in recursive thinking. At the same time, it is true that you can make parsing extremely complicated. Mostly, this tends to…
FINAL STATUS (2026-10-21): the CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619 memory-corruption class shipped patches 2026-10-21. On the patch, that class is closed: the cached-pointer chain dies at the addref and the serialize-state path is a memory-safety bug, not code execution. Two session-handling flaws survive on…
This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer.
