Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 644 posts.

Any topic
2013
225

Why Use Make

I love Make . You may think of Make as merely a tool for building large binaries or libraries (and it is, almost to a fault), but it’s much more than that. Makefiles are machine-readable documentation that make your workflow reproducible.

228

Call me maybe: Cassandra

Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…

237

The $12 Gongkai Phone

Recently, I paid $ 12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.