Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
[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 →
In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...
Today we filed 422 + 36 complaints on "cookie banners" with ten European Data Protection Authorities.
We are sharing details of our next generation chip in our Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) family. MTIA is a long-term bet to provide the most efficient architecture for Meta’s unique workloads.
Hello, tl;dr We are moving forward with subscriptions with important adjustments. You will receive a perpetual fallback license once you pay for a year up front or 12 consecutive months. You wi
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…
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer.
Take an in-depth look at the MIR lightweight JIT compiler project's goals and state of development, such as the addition of support for CRuby.
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
Counterpoint Research Insight
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmente...
Introducing Dolly, the first open-source, commercially viable instruction-tuned LLM, enabling accessible and cost-effective AI solutions.
Today we are happy to release the source code of a project we’ve been working on for the past few months. It is called BoringTun, and is a userspace implementation of the WireGuard® protocol written in Rust.
This is the introduction of a multipart series. It is to give a high level overview without really deeply diving into any individual component.
One year of journalism without subscriptions, without ads and without clickbait
This page summarizes the changes between official stable releases of Go. The change log has the full details.
Many CPUs have been used in space craft, space stations and other such probes. Such CPUs must be highly reliable, and very durable. The temperatures in space, even with heaters, can vary widely. The radiation that a system is exposed too can be immense. So when designing one of these systems designers don't always use…
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its...
When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it…
Go 1.25 includes a new experimental garbage collector, Green Tea.
Google’s first custom-designed co-processor for consumer products is built into every Pixel 2. Soon, it will enable more applications to use Pixel 2’s camera for taking …
The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…
