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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 447 posts.
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How Browsers Work
This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code. She wrote:
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #3/3
In Part 1 of the series, we took a look at undefined behavior in C and showed some cases where it allows C to be more performant than "safe" languages.
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SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web
As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In…
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Errata: Steve Gibson
a summary of Steven Gibson events and quotes demonstrating charlatan status
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steve yegge - five-essential-phone-screen-questions
The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ I've been on a lot of SDE interview loops lately where the candidate failed miserably: not-inclined votes all around, even from the phone screeners who brought the person in initially. It's usually pretty obvious when the
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Kind of Screwed
TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing […]
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Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Fill this in yourself.
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How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
Detailed breakdown explaining questionable marketing techniques used by AirBnB. By David Gooden, marketing expert & MN luxury realtor.
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Open Source (Almost) Everything
When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were…
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"Another World" (game) Code Review
I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable. I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting…
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SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really)
There has been a long running debate in the Application Platform Services Group here at Burton Group between the REST people on one side and the SOAP people on the other. For the most part it mirrors the external debate. In one recent exchange, while discussing the complexity of SOAP and the web services framework…
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The True Cost of Commuting
It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block’s Annual Stree…
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Complex numbers have never been so intuitive to me
Imaginary numbers always confused me. Like understanding e, most explanations fell into one of two categories: Gee, what a great way to encourage math in…
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The Backblaze Blog
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
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nasal demons
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
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People
This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source. It's been passed on many times, and in the way of most internet memes has mutated along the way. It struck me as…
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Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
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The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth : Bruce F. Webster
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
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Cordless Dog: Stay
If you're fastidious about keeping your windows tidy, Stay is for you. Stay ensures that your windows are where you want them, even as you connect and disconnect displays.
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Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
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"Schneier's Law"
Back in 1998, I wrote: Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. In 2004, Cory Doctorow called this Schneier’s law: …what I think of as Schneier’s Law: “any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to…
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Advice From An Old Programmer
You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.