Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 912 posts.

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2021
452

Consider SQLite

If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc. Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?

463

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR

Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little…

464

What's Salesforce? (2019)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the biggest, fastest growing software market in the world. $40B is spent on CRMs annually, and almost all companies have one. But for those of us that don’t directly use a CRM… what’s the big deal? A CRM is the source-of-truth for all customer data and interactions. Need to…

476

The Actual OSI Model

I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that…