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A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
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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Safe to swim in nuclear spent fuel pool?
What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
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How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
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How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
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Myanmar: Facebook’s systems promoted violence against Rohingya; Meta owes reparations
Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.
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Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal
Build your software factory on Warp: factories as code, any model or harness, with evals, benchmarks, and self-improvement built in.
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PHP: A fractal of bad design
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
188
The Wrong Abstraction (2016)
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >
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The Growth Ponzi Scheme
The American pattern of development creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed…and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.
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The Lisp Curse
The expressive power of Lisp has drawbacks.
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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As I remember London
As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice…
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A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution
Posted by Ian Beer & Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero We want to thank Citizen Lab ...
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How to Corrupt a SQLite Database File
An SQLite database is highly resistant to corruption. If an application crash, or an operating-system crash, or even a power failure occurs in the middle of a transaction, the partially written transaction should be automatically rolled back the next time the database file is accessed. The recovery process is fully…
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Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
Perhaps you've read posts like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods programmers believe about time . Maybe you've also read Falsehoods programmers believe about geography .
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Event Sourcing (2005)
Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events.
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Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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GrapheneOS attestation compatibility guide
Guide on using remote attestation in a way that's compatible with GrapheneOS.
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How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties
The basic formula for Hacker News ranking has been known for years , but questions remained. Does the published code give the real algorithm...
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Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
You surely know this: You're looking at some website with some useful shell commands. However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them). So, what do you do? You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
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CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns” (2017)
Over the last several years, the way I write CSS has transitioned from a "semantic" approach to something more like what people call "functional CSS." In this post I explain how I got to this point and share some of the lessons and insights I've picked up along the way.
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PEP 0484 – Type Hints is accepted
PEP 3107 introduced syntax for function annotations, but the semantics were deliberately left undefined. There has now been enough 3rd party usage for static type analysis that the community would benefit from a standard vocabulary and baseline tools w...
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Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD