Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
Being swamped — overwhelmed by stuff to do — is the default state of being within a startup. There's always more to do than time to do it, and the list keeps growing. Everyone else working at every other startup feels this too. Even if it doesn't look that way
Gautham's Blog
My Dad died on 5 December 2021. My earliest memory is sitting on his shoulders watching a Guy Fawkes bonfire on one of several visits to the UK as a child. An…
What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake?
Brad, a top footballer, sits in the bleachers watching the game. He cannot believe his eyes. He has come to watch his friend Edgar play, and Edgar is the worst football player he has ever seen. He stands around, chewing gum. When he runs at all, he runs like a
Nuclear power currently makes up slightly less than 20% of the total electricity produced in the US, largely from plants built in the 70s and 80s.
Apps create more friction for ordering pizza
I first wrote about the problem of bots front-running transactions a year and a half ago in The Order Flow , citing Dan Robinson and Georgio...
I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep , my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on…
All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires.
A minimal guide to everyday Git for solo developers: initialize a repo, add files, commit changes, view history, and restore earlier versions.
Long story short: I’ve taken a new position in Luxembourg and I have tofind an apartment, in a different country, in a reasonably short time.
Macrocosm is a mobile game that takes you from atom to galactic empire across seven interconnected stages where making progress in one stage gives you a boost in the next! This post is a deep dive into the (nearly) four years of free time I spent making it.
tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found it so useful I wrote a free online guide to help others learn it. Then I decided the guide wasn’t good enough and wrote Practical TLA+ in 2018. Then I decided the…
TLDR? You can find the code and a bunch of examples on GitHub at dps/rust-raytracer. Over the holiday break, I decided to learn Rust. Rust is a modern systems programming language which has a really interesting type system. The type system can catch broad classes of common programming mistakes - e.g. ensuring memory…
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
Very few companies even consider this option, and that's a mistake
Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a…
How best to punish spammers? I give this topic a lot of thought because I spend a lot of time sifting through the endless rubbish they send me. And that's when it dawned on me: the punishment should fit the crime - robbing me of my time - which means that
Nine observations about what happens when you eat only potatoes
A new way to think about brainpower.
Monopoly This is the difference between “pro-business” and “pro-market” policies which are often conflated. The former leads to concentration of
For decades, we've asked ourselves "Can it run Doom?". Now we can finally make the ultimate punchline: "Can Doom run it?"
How I chose parts, built, and configured my first custom home storage server.
Rust has been on my radar for a long time now , and about a year ago I finally began allocating some time every week to learning it.
This is a rumor, it may have rubber floors, but that water will be trapped under the floor and rust your Honda Element from the inside out.
Perhaps it will turn out that you were called to be an artist. If that is your fate, then accept it and deal with it, the highs and the lows, the burden and the greatness, without ever worrying about external rewards.
mvSQLite is the open-source , SQLite-compatible distributed database. We decoupled SQLite's storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet "bottomless" scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.
