Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.
Here's to the Next 3 Years (Yehuda Katz Moves On)
I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard's very first "Engineering" hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra's Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.
I Believe Zig Has Function Colors
Proponents of Zig claim that it does not have function colors. In this post, I attempt prove that it does.
How to achieve low latency with 10Gbps Ethernet
In a recent blog post we explained how to tweak a simple UDP application to maximize throughput. This time we are going to optimize our UDP application for latency. Fighting with latency is a great excuse to discuss modern features of multiqueue NICs.
1.0 Is The Loneliest Number
Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. N…
Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
Asm.js Speedups Everywhere
asm.js is an easy-to-optimize subset of JavaScript. It runs in all browsers without plugins, and is a good target for porting C/C++ codebases such as game engines - which have ...
Jax vs. Julia (Vs PyTorch)
A while ago there was an interesting thread on the Julia Discourse about the “state of machine learning in Julia”. I posted a response discussing the differences between Julia and Python (both JAX and PyTorch), and it seemed to be really well received! Since then this topic seems to keep coming up, so I thought I’d…
Detecting and countering misuse of AI
Anthropic's August 2025 threat intelligence report on AI cybercrime and other abuses.
JVM Anatomy Quarks: Compressed References
"JVM Anatomy Quarks" is the on-going mini-post series, where every post is describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM. The name underlines the fact that the single post cannot be taken in isolation, and most pieces described here are going to readily interact with each other.
‘Give away your Legos’ and other commandments for scaling startups
Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.
Safe Native Code
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
Modern TLS/SSL on 16-bit Windows
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
CloudFlare, SSL and unhealthy security absolutism
Let's start with a quick quiz: Take a look at haveibeenpwned.com [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and tell me where the traffic is encrypted between: You see HTTPS which is good so you know it's doing crypto things in your browser, but where's the other end of
Design
I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…
Good Bad ISPs
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship. | Good Bad ISPs
Something weird is happening with LLMs and Chess
are they good or bad?
Tiny ELF Files: Revisited in 2021
Quick edit: While I work on a proper update, I'll note here that several posters on reddit and hackernews have pointed out ways to bring the total size of the program down to 105 bytes while still printing the full "Hello, world!" Much credit goes to Josh Triplett , who produced the 105-byte version which you can find…
How much is YouTube worth today?
Google acquired YouTube for US$1.6bn in 2006. In 2022, YouTube could be worth over US$180bn achieving a +110x return. Analysis of YouTube revenue and usage statistics and financial metrics.
Live Not by Lies (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler and LLVM
If you read the LLVM 2.7 release notes carefully you would have noticed that one of the new external users is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). As the author of the LLVM backend for GHC, I have been invited to write a post detailing the design of the backend and my experiences with using LLVM.
You shouldn't invoke setup.py directly
The setup.py interface is an old convention from distutils, one that has bugs that cannot be fixed to bring it into line with modern Python packaging approaches. As a result, all direct...
A Word on Omarchy
An in-depth look at the currently trending Arch Linux configuration that is Omarchy.
The Go 1.1 scheduler
One of the big features for Go 1.1 is the new scheduler, contributed by Dmitry Vyukov. The new scheduler has given a dramatic increase in performance for parallel Go programs and with nothing better to do, I figured I'd write something about it.