Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 810 posts.
A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. Provided for historical interest only. The diagrams are a bit dotty, but available in versioins linked below. The text has not been changed, even…
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can g...
China has become largely self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. The strong impetus for nuclear power in China is increasingly due to air pollution from coal-fired plants.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
This FAQ addresses questions for developers & companies interested in working on Business Source License (BSL) software or adopting BSL for their own business.
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
While discussing with fellow developers, I was asked the following question a few times: We spend most of our time as developers thinking, not editing code; so, why invest time into mastering a complicated code editor, and why lose some cognitive resources on thinking about text editing instead of about the real…
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun's control of the…
Reducing energy usage has been a major focus for us over the past 10 years: we have built our own super-efficient servers at Google, invented more efficient ways to cool our data centres and invested heavily in green energy sources, with the goal of being powered 100 percent by renewable energy.
CloudFlare protects over 4 million Internet properties using our global network which spans 86 cities across 45 countries. Running this network give us a unique vantage point to track the evolving cost of bandwidth around the world.
The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software.
Esperanto: espèce de conlang
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
Note: The timeline has been updated. Please see our October 2021 post for more details. We have always believed in making the open, inter...
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
Posted by John Rae-Grant, Product Manager Have you ever wondered why Gmail asks you before showing images in emails? We did this to protec...
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some…
Modern cars have fancy infotainment setups, big screens and all sorts of computers with networked functionality built-in. Part of that fanciness is increasingly often a curl install. curl is a part of the standard GenIVI and Tizen offers for cars and is used in lots of other independent software installs too. This…
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. A year ago, we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default. Over the past year, we...
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
