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The 5-Hour CDN
You can build a functional CDN on an 8-year-old laptop while you're sitting at a coffee shop. Here's what a CDN you put together in five hours might look like.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,903 posts.
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Gmail Launches Add-ons
New Gmail Add-ons to help you speed up your workflows at work.
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Inheritance Often Doesn't Make Sense
There are three different types of inheritance going on. Ontological inheritance is about specialisation: this thing is a specific variety of that thing (a football is a sphere and it has this radius) Abstract data type inheritance is about substitution: this thing behaves in all the ways that thing does and has this…
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The next generation of Instapaper
When I launched Instapaper in 2008, it was a very basic web app. It quickly expanded to define the pillars of the read-later market: a one-click “read later” bookmarklet, a web sync service, an adjustable text view optimized for reading, and an iPhone app with offline saving. I did almost everything myself, which…
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Amazon Aurora Backtrack
We’ve all been there! You need to make a quick, seemingly simple fix to an important production database. You compose the query, give it a once-over, and let it run. Seconds later you realize that you forgot the WHERE clause, dropped the wrong table, or made another serious mistake, and interrupt the query, but the […]
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Tor at the Heart: Firefox
During the month of December, we're highlighting other organizations and projects that rely on...
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The best things and stuff of 2025
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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A humble guide to database schema design
Having a good database schema design is crucial for building applications that will need to scale in traffic and complexity. If you happen to do a bad design choice you will see that it takes a lot of effort to stop the pattern from propagating to your backends’ services and controllers, and finally to your frontend.
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In Praise of AutoHotKey
People think it’s weird that I do all my development on a Windows machine. It’s definitely a second-class citizen experience in the wider development world, and Windows has a lot of really frustrating issues, but it’s still my favorite operating system. This is for exactly one reason: AutoHotKey. AHK is an engine for…
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Bots, so many bots
Is Product Hunt worth it? Dive into the data to find out.
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Why Microsoft Word must die
I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...
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Hard Drive Reliability Review for 2015
In 2015 we ran 56,224 hard drives in our datacenter. In this post we review the reliability of the Seagate, HGST, Toshiba, and Western Digital drives.
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz. One…
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Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving
Dynamic programming has a reputation as a technique you learn in school, then only use to pass interviews at software companies. Indeed, most developers do not regularly work on problems where dynamic programming is needed. Ultimately, dynamic programming is a technique for efficiently solving problems that can be…
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The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2
I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!
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Ceph: A Journey to 1 TiB/s
Ceph is an open source distributed storage system designed to evolve with data.
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Startups Are Hard
Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, "I'm a founder!" Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it's just that the investors don't have as much leverage as they used to, but they still…
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I bought netflix.soy
An exploration into top level domains. How I ended up buying netflix.soy and domains from facebook, microsoft and google.
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Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive
If we can align the incentives of the players involved, we can build infrastructure that is actually necessary and while doing it quicker and at lower prices than we do now.
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Let's Encrypt: Looking Forward to 2019
Let’s Encrypt had a great year in 2018. We’re now serving more than 150 million websites while maintaining a stellar security and compliance track record. Most importantly though, the Web went from 67% encrypted page loads to 77% in 2018, according to statistics from Mozilla. This is an incredible rate of change! We’d…
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A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality
While perusing HackerNews today, I encountered this article and this comment thread by Paul Graham (PG for short), founder of Ycombinator. I think that a lengthy response is in order. I originally …
9413
Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their “most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters”. It’s currently available via their website and …
9414
Everything must be paid for twice
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’...
9415
Flipping Pages: New Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and exploitation techniques
A tale about exploiting KernelCTF Mitigation, Debian, and Ubuntu instances with a double-free in nf_tables in the Linux kernel, using novel techniques like Dirty Pagedirectory. All without even having to recompile the exploit for different kernel targets once.
9416
I wrote a small piece on planned death
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
9417
Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot
I recently posted a blog post about a new hash table, and whenever I do something like that, I learn at least one new thing from my comments. In my last comment section Rich Geldreich talks about h…
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Retrieving your browsing history through a CAPTCHA
Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
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