Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
These extensions expand the x86 instruction set with access to registers and features that improve performance.
Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
This is part 1 of a series where I’ll look at the future costs of clean energy and mobility technologies.
JSON vs. XML
Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there's a better way to build software. This is foundational stuff for the…
The Shape of a Mars Mission
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
Deconstructing K&R C (2010)
Learn C The Hard Way (LCTHW) is a practical book teaching real world useful C using the same proven Learn The Hard Way method. LCTHW teaches real robust C coding and defensive programming tactics on real hardware rather than abstract machines and pedantic theory. The book emphasizes breaking your code on purpose, and…
How Gmail’s Image Caching Affects Open Tracking
Browse how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business, plus thought-provoking podcasts and films to inspire your inner entrepreneur.
Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects
In P of EAA I said "don't distribute your objects". Does this advice contradict my interest in Microservices?
Startup Equity For Employees
2020 PREFACE: I originally wrote this back in the mid-2000s and have resurrected it by request.
Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
Summary of June 8 outage
We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. Here's a rundown of what happened, why, and what we're doing about it.
Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)
I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way.
Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
The Find My network accessory program enables users to keep track of their belongings in the new Items tab within the Find My app
Racket-On-Chez Status
posted by Matthew Flatt with thanks to collaborators Kent Dybvig, Andy Keep, Gustavo Massaccesi, Sarah Spall, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, and Jon Zeppieri It's been almost a year since we decided to try running Racket on Chez Scheme, and it has been almost six ...
Suicide Attempters’ Long-Term Survival
Most efforts to prevent suicide focus on why people take their lives. But as we understand more about who attempts suicide
FreeBSD – A lesson in poor defaults
This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
Fun With HTTP Headers
Like any good web developer, I have a tendency to poke around at people’s web sites to see if I can figure out how they’re implemented. After poking at enough sites, I started noticing that people were putting some weird and interesting stuff in their HTTP headers. So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to actually go…
Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
Summary: $200B Broadband Scandal (2005)
The case is simple: Do you have a 45 Mbps, bi-directional service to your home, paying around $40? Do you have 500+ channels and can choose any competitive service? You paid an estimated $2000 for this product even though you did not receive it and it may never be available. Do you want your money back and the…
What’s Next in Making Encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS the Default
More than 70,000 users have already chosen on their own to explicitly enable DoH in Firefox Release edition. We are close to releasing DoH in the USA, and we have a few updates to share.
CloudFlare and Free Speech
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.
Sustainability with Rust
Rust is a programming language implemented as a set of open source projects. It combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java. Rust started in 2006 as a personal project of Graydon Hoare before becoming a research project at…