Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
Today I landed yet another small change to libcurl internals that further reduces the number of small mallocs we do. This time the generic linked list functions got converted to become malloc-less (the way linked list functions should behave, really). Instrument mallocs I started out my quest a few weeks ago by…
When Git first came onto the scene in the mid 2000's, I was initially skeptical because of its horrible user interface. But once I learned it, I appreciated its speed and features - especially the ease at which you could create feature branches, merge, and even create commits offline (which was a big deal in the era…
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
Why building a better browser doesn’t translate to a better marketshare I posted a couple weeks ago about Chrome effectively having won the browser wars. The market share observations in the blog p…
Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed.
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
WebGL is, all things considered, a pretty decent API. It’s not a great API, but that’s just because OpenGL is also not a great API. It gives you raw access to the GPU and is pretty low-level. For those intimidated by something so low-level, there are quite a few higher-level engines like three.js and Unity which are…
I used to dread setting up email automation and email campaigns. Why? Because before a single sales or marketing email could be sent, it needed a design. In my attempt to sidestep this time-consuming process, I learned that plain emails not only save time but work better. Why Design
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
I like Git. I use it all the time. As I sometimes do, I recently took some time to really dig in, read through documentation, and review my global Git configuration. Welcome to my fourth stack...
I made a new years resolution to read at least one C source file from OpenBSD daily.The goal was to both get better at C and to contribute more to the base s...
Earlier this week, I read a really interesting piece on 3 things that need to be done to save the web [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet] . The first observation was that "we’ve lost control of our personal data" and
At this point we have a TCP/IP stack that is able to communicate to other hosts in the Internet. The implementation so far has been fairly straight-forward, but missing a major feature: Reliability. Namely, our TCP does not guarantee the integrity of the data stream it presents to applications. Even establishing the…
Premise In 2017 the most popular web games like agar.io are networked via WebSockets over TCP. If a UDP equivalent of WebSockets could be incorporated into browsers, it would greatly improve the networking of these games. Background Web browsers are built on top of HTTP, which is a stateless request/response protocol…
This is my exit interview from social media. Some of these “services” I abandoned years ago. Others I am still struggling to avoid. From experience, I assume that you, reader, will make it impossible for me to remain ignorant of developments WRT: all of this garbage. What all of this garbage has in common is that it…
Update 2019: This article got 183 comments on Reddit, and 237 comments on Hacker News. Many commenters said it couldn’t be done — they…
Why we never thank open source maintainers - Unicooo
