Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 646 posts.

Any topic
2015
95

The Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.

100

Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)

I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…

114

To ECC or Not to ECC

On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a

116

Pattern: Back ends for front ends

With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …

120

Understanding Container Reuse in AWS Lambda

Tim Wagner, AWS Lambda AWS Lambda functions execute in a container (sandbox) that isolates them from other functions and provides the resources, such as memory, specified in the function’s configuration. In this article we discuss how Lambda creates and reuses these sandboxes, and the impact of those policies on the…