Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.

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2048

Git at any scale

Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…

2051

Popcount CPU instruction

Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .

2052

* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW

One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting…

2053

Minimum Viable Block Chain

Block chain is agnostic of any 'currency' and it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. This is a ground up explanation of why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the minimum viable block chain with all of…

2066

Believe you can change

Carol Dweck was obsessed with failure. You know how some people just seem to succeed at everything they do, while others seem helpless, doomed to a life of constant failure? Dweck noticed that too — and she was determined to figure out why. So she began watching kids, trying to see if she could spot the difference…

2068

Differentiable Neural Computers

In a recent study in Nature, we introduce a form of memory-augmented neural network called a differentiable neural computer, and show that it can learn to use its memory to answer questions about complex, structured data, including artificially generated stories, family trees, and even a map of the London Underground…

2070

Coming Home to Vim

I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.