Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
Sqlite 3.30.0
This page provides a high-level summary of changes to SQLite. For more detail, see the Fossil checkin logs at https://sqlite.org/src/timeline and https://sqlite.org/src/timeline?t=release . See the chronology a succinct listing of releases.
The Global Dollar Short Squeeze
Published February 2020 There is currently a short squeeze affecting most of the global economy, slowing its growth. This has been the case well before the impacts from the trade war and the coronavirus. A short squeeze occurs when something that is heavily shorted goes on to rise sharply in price for one reason or […]
Java for Everything
I used to ask interviewees, “What’s your favorite programming language?” The answer was nearly always, “I just choose the right language for the job.” Duh. Does anyone ever deliberately pick the wrong language? This was clearly a way to avoid actually naming a language for fear of picking one I didn’t like.
Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible
Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment , and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Microsoft, Lenovo, and any number of Lenovo’s business partners intended for it to have. Now all you need is an SSH client so…
Cool but obscure X11 tools
Cool, but obscure X11 tools.
Performance Improvements in .NET 6
Take a rip-roarin' tour through hundreds of PRs worth of performance improvements for .NET 6.
Restoration of defocused and blurred images
Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. There are especial cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement - and these very defects, which each of you knows very…
Django 1.6 released
The latest official version is 6.1.3
Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was a Correct Rejection
My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology…
Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
✪ Update 2021-06-11 For WWDC 2021, Apple has posted an excellent video on EDR.
Globally Distributed Postgres
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
“It turns out” (2010)
"It turns out" became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays . Coincidence?
Why is a Rust executable large?
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment (2009)
CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The…
Look at yourself objectively
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just…
How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol
The Signal Protocol is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption for private communications exchanged daily by billions of people around the world. After its publication in 2013, the Signal Protocol was adopted not only by Signal but well beyond. Technical informat...
Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report [pdf]
We use data to tell stories of business-related trends we focus on. We hope others take the ideas, build on them & make them better.