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Making Minecraft Spherical
Discover the unique design challenges of creating a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like blocks.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,177 posts.
932
Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
Sadly, taking away valuable disclosure avoidance tools doesn't make fundamental trade-offs go away.
933
We need a middle class for startups
Idea: Make Mittelstands cool in America. Rebrand the US Middle Market. Create a studio and fund to build and buy Mittelstands.
934
Still alive
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake
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I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'
I was 30 seconds away from running malware, Here's how a sophisticated scam operation almost got me, and why every developer needs to read this.
937
From Asm.js to WebAssembly
tl;dr I’m burying the lede with context and catch-up material first, so impatient or already-clued-in readers should skip to below the videos for today’s big news. Or just read Luke Wagner ‘s blog post right now.
938
Personal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…
939
Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
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Don't you lecture me with your thirty dollar website
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942
Fight back against Google AMP (2018)
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short.AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this…
943
Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
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Why you should not use Google Cloud
FINAL UPDATE (25-March-2022): Because of this article, we often keep getting asked if we still use GCP and if we would recommend it to…
946
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
This is the story of how I found what I believe to be scientific misconduct and what happened when I reported it. Science is supposed to b...
947
Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
948
Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem
Two years ago, something very strange happened to me while working from my home network. I was exploiting a blind XXE vulnerability that required an external HTTP server to smuggle out files, so I spun up an AWS box and ran a simple Python webserver to receive the traffic from the vulnerable server.
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Marble Fountain
I really enjoy procedural generation, especially systems designed to work with hardware outputs. After starting work at Formlabs in September of 2023 and gaining access to much nicer printers than I was used to, I started wanting to tackle some large algorithmic structure projects. Complexity is free in 3d printing…
951
Intel's disruption is now complete
“Look, Clayton, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to read drivel from academics but someone you told me you had this theory… and I’m…
952
How to Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
953
The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
954
Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
In iOS 26.3, Apple introduced a new privacy feature which limits “precise location” data made available to cellular networks via cell towers. The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025. The announcement1 says https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101 ↩
955
Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
A real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime.
956
On Being a Principal Engineer
The manager’s pathI bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer ...
957
KDE is now my favorite desktop
From my last blog post , I am now using KDE as the desktop environment for my gaming rig. The reason is because I want a reasonably easy to use Linux desktop for when my wife needs to use the PC for something other than gaming, and this was the reason why my "traditional" Sway setup was a no-go.
958
Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
Thanks to a recruiting process that left a bad taste in my mouth, I refuse to accept any further interviews from large tech companies unless they are on my terms.
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