Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.
Arguments from Global Warming Skeptics and what the science really says
Examines the science and arguments of global warming skepticism. Common objections like 'global warming is caused by the sun', 'temperature has changed naturally in the past' or 'other planets are warming too' are examined to see what the science really says.
n-gate.com. we can't both be right.
Does anyone have any questions about NAFTA for my PSYCHIC PIG?
The Anti-Reactionary FAQ
[Edit 3/2014: I no longer endorse all the statements in this document. I think many of the conclusions are still correct, but especially section 1 is weaker than it should be, and many reactionarie…
Countering "Trusting Trust"
Way back in 1974, Paul Karger and Roger Schell discovered a devastating attack against computer systems. Ken Thompson described it in his classic 1984 speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” Basically, an attacker changes a compiler binary to produce malicious versions of some programs, INCLUDING ITSELF. Once this is…
Watts Backlist
A part of new Peter Watts' novel.
The Archive (macOS) – Note Taking: Nimble, Calm, Plain.txt • Zettelkasten Method
Calm, simple, and beautiful macOS note-taking app for creative thinking.
The Simple Truth
“I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth.”
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).
Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
Why Amazon Has No Profits
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
Guns
Do you have a gun in your home? In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now? Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?
The Backblaze Blog
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post
Hi there. If we haven’t met, my name is Mr. Money Mustache. I’m the freaky financial magician who retired along with a lovely wife at age 30 in order to start a family, as well as start…
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.
As of June 2025, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s.
Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
Bell Labs and CSP Threads
This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…
Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
What’s behind the recent surge in the M1 money supply?
While the terms “money” and “wealth” often mean the same thing in everyday parlance, economists define money more narrowly as the component of wealth consisting of
The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…