Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
ADSL works over wet string (2017)
Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us...
A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
Apache Arrow and the “Things I Hate About Pandas”
This post is the first of many to come on Apache Arrow, pandas, pandas2, and the general trajectory of my work in recent times and into the foreseeable future. This is a bit of a read and overall fairly technical, but if interested I encourage you to take the time to work through it.
Software Freedom Conservancy files GPL lawsuit against Vizio
The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
OpenAI shares findings from the Hugging Face security incident and the steps we’re taking to strengthen AI model security, monitoring, and alignment.
Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians
Vehicles with especially tall front ends are most dangerous to pedestrians, but a blunt profile makes medium-height vehicles deadly too.
Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to Use Vim Was Wrong
A couple weeks ago, I took the plunge and switched to vim (MacVIM, to be precise). It wasn't the first time I tried to make the switch, and I had pretty much written it off entirely. Why? Because the past few times I tried switching to vim, I took
RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…
How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub (2008)
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
Why Startup Hubs Work
October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions…
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations. An update on our exploratory research on model welfare.
CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
The latest report in EPI’s annual series analyzing current and long-term trends in CEO compensation.
Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
Code is not Literature
I have started code reading groups at the last two companies I’ve worked at, Etsy and Twitter, and some folks have asked for my advice about code reading and running code reading groups. Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I…
Files Are Fraught with Peril
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth
How Cloudflare uses generative AI to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.
Rwasa – A high-performance web server in x86_64 assembly
rwasa is our full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx . It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years' experience with high volume web environments. In addition to…
Zero-Bundle-Size React Server Components
This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts. 2020 has been a long year. As it comes to an end we wanted to share a special Holiday Update on our research into zero-bundle-size React Server Components. To introduce React Server Components, we have prepared a talk and a demo. If you…
There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
What is the function of a fire alarm?
Baby's First Garbage Collector
When I get stressed out and have too much to do, I have this paradoxical reaction where I escape from that by coming up with another thing to do. Usually it’s a tiny self-contained program that I can write and finish.
Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't (2019)
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…