Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,199 posts.
Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerge. David Siegel advocates for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen keeps it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combines flair with usability.
Running a Tor Exit Node for Fun and E-mails
The Tor Project is a non-profit organization in the United States that created Tor, The Onion Router, a free software that creates an open network of volunteers which helps people anonymize their traffic by routing it through three or more other computers before it reaches its final destination.
Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020)
The way I was taught x86 assembly at the university had been completely outdated for many years by the time I had my first class. It was around 2008 or 2009, and 64-bit processors had already started becoming a thing even in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we were doing DOS, real-mode, memory segmentation and all the…
Screw stigma. I’m coming out.
I’ve kept it to myself for years, but now I believe the only way to fight the stigma of mental illness is to talk about my own.
Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU
Rubén Osorio’s blog
Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health
This should be a hard blog post to write–after all, it’s the one where I openly admit I had an emotional breakdown and saw a mental health professional–but it’s actually easy. And it’s easy because it has a good ending: facing long odds and a frustrating situation, I ended up turning everything around and getting a…
Tor is a great sysadmin tool (2020)
Using Tor to aid various system administration tasks, including checking firewall rules, bypassing internal network restrictions and connecting to remote systems that are behind NAT/CGNAT.
An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thousands of RSA Keys
RSA encryption allows for anyone to send me messages that only I can decode. To set this up, I select two large random primes $latex p$ and $latex q$ (each of which is hundreds of bits long), and r…
MarkMonitor left 60k domains for the taking
Thanks to Nagli and d0xing for helping figure out what was happening with this issue.
Curl, 17 years old today
Today we celebrate the fact that it is exactly 17 years since the first public release of curl. I have always been the lead developer and maintainer of the project. When I released that first version in the spring of 1998, we had only a handful of users and a handful of contributors. curl was … Continue reading curl…
Let’s Invent B(+)-Trees
Say we have some things, and we want to be able to store and look them up in order. We could just put them in a big sorted array:
An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown
Mandarin version by Misaka Clover | Japanese version The first time I came to Shanghai, in 2017, I was amazed by how developed the city was. My only other Asian experience was Mumbai, and compared to that, Shanghai was clean and organized. I was amazed by how you could pay for a laundrette with […]
Programming breakthroughs we need
Matyáš Racek's blog
Building a vision of life without work (2015)
The number one question that people ask once you tell them you’re considering early retirement is: What will you do with your time?
The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
Bots have taken over
Mountain Lion: John Gruber's personal briefing
It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.
My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong.
A comment left on Slashdot
The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don̵…
Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering
As a seasoned software engineer, I've discovered that there's so much more to the field than what's taught in school. From the importance of understanding business needs and the value of soft skills, to the necessity of continuous learning and the reality of dealing with legacy code, my journey has been filled with…
You might not need WebSockets
Websockets are powerful tools that have become a fan-favorite for building realtime applications, but you might be using them for all the wrong reasons. Let's explore the pitfalls of websockets and how we can use plain old HTTP to get the same job done.
Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended
Why time seems to pass faster as we age
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling. A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen. It seems cosmically unfair – we have fewer years to live, and each year flies by faster. 2/ But, why is that happening? My tentative conclusion is that… Read More
Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I …
Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
Three months ago, I quit my job at Google to start my own company. This past week, I decided that I wanted to get a feel for how much it…
How to get hired at a startup when you don't know anyone
A few years ago I saw an early stage startup that I knew I had to be a part of. The only problem was that it was 900 miles away and I had no connection to them. The startup was Formlabs . At the time they had 10 employees, and like most startups reduced risk by hiring people they knew. They were also situated…