Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,176 posts.
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
For the last decade, fast-to-ship beat fast-to-run. Not anymore.
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
That’s a quote from Cindy Li — “We're all just temporarily abled”. I first heard it in Sara’s course and it’s been on repeat in my mind ever since June 6th…
This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their…
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
I love to travel and for a long time I have been looking for the largest & most detailed world map available. ? I couldn't find the perfect one so I did it by myself. Here's what I've learned from working for more than 1,5 years on this.
What happens when you set fontSize: 32 in your favorite editor
The animated ASCII globe surrounded by its own source code. An quine in 1024 bytes of JavaScript.
Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
What happens when you responsibly disclose a critical vulnerability exposing personal data - including that of minors - and the organization responds with legal threats instead of a thank you?
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
I got an email from Network Solutions — where I still have two domains, originally registered in the ’90s — that informed me I have been enrolled in their WebLock Program.
Context Engineering is the new skill in AI. It is about providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time.
My most popular article about Google - breakthrough in gms
November 2012 The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others…
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
2 weeks of dealing with Google as a developer
I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university wh…
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.
The personal site of Chris Hacken — entrepreneur and operator who founded and sold Loop Internet. Essays and a podcast on building internet infrastructure, companies, and other hard things.
Back in the day when the British had a penchant for conquering the world, they ran into a little problem on the subcontinent; cobras. Turns out there were a hell of a lot of the buggers wandering around India and it also turned out that they were rather venomous which
This is a story about 5 Low-Severity bugs I pulled together to create a simple but high severity exploit, giving me access to private reposi...
