Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
Once Stripe is supported in your country, you’ll be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken…
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E…
May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who…
In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling…
A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity.
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of…
In order to make progress against poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1
Because our product is written in C++, which can easily be compiled into WebAssembly, Figma is a perfect demonstration of this new format’s power.
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a…
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
Randomness, entropy, and the Linux kernel.
An article about Lisp programming language.
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.
We are the home of quality software such as dwm , dmenu , st and plenty of other tools , with a focus on simplicity, clarity and frugality. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector. Unfortunately, the tendency for…
Dr. Alan Kay explains when "object-oriented" was first used and what it means. []
Defining the microservices architectural style by describing their nine common characteristics
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
Get the key facts about CrowdStrike's work with the Democratic Natiional Committee in 2016 and debunk the false claims that have been made about our work.
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
