Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
I just did what no startup founder is ever supposed to do. I gave up. It wasn’t even one of those glorious “fail fast and fail forward” learning experiences. After seven months of hard work and two weeks before we were to start ...
To not become "old news," I write to the Ruby community in days of war Russia leads against my country.
Update: 2022-04-15 I typically average around 100 unique visitors to this site per day. Below is a screenshot from my Plausible analytics setup showing the traffic spike up to almost 14k unique visitors from HackerNews (and other sources). Update: 2022-04-12 I posted this article to that orange site and it blew up…
Happy New Year, everyone! It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable—though most of us wouldn’t know for at least two more months—just how freakishly horr…
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.
Contrary to his original intentions, cryptocurrencies and DeFi platforms are now more vulnerable to privacy breaches and hacking than…
The perils of remaining neutral on a global scale: fanning the flames and selling the extinguisher.
If you're anything like me, you love emojis! Emojis appear like an image on the screen, but they aren't an image like a PNG or JPEG. What do emojis look like to computers? 

0x820x820x980...
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
It’s still an open question
An update on my years-long habit, with a new tool.
Hacky repo to see what the Copilot extension sends to the server
When a sale isn’t quite what it seems to be
After a 23-year career at Microsoft, Facebook, and a Gates Foundation nonprofit, Philip Su burned out and found unexpected recovery working as an Amazon warehouse associate.
A Home Assistant Love Story
I love Longmont’s municipal broadband, but we had to fight Comcast every step of the way to get it.
------ Update 03/12/2022 Reuters has published new information on this incident, which initially matches the proposed scenario. You can find...
It's a wise saying, because we game developers have so much fun making the underlying foundations, that we never get around to adding the actual gameplay.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Modern mobile devices contain a myriad of distractions and addictive platforms. My vices are Twitter and TikTok.
A breakdown of selling 640 copies of my first product Deployment from Scratch.
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
