9751
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,207 posts.
9752
Don't ignore the janitor
The importance of seeing, smiling and talking to people
9753
Microtiming in Metallica's “Master of Puppets” (2014)
Metallica’s song “Master of Puppets” has extremely powerful and driving momentum, which is especially impressive given that it is riddled with meter changes and thrashes on for al…
9754
Why is a Rust executable large?
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
9755
9756
Senior engineers are living in the future
I magine for a moment that, by some quirk of the universe, you are sharing your workspace with a time traveller. Specifically, yourself from 1 year in the future. How will you react to your new co-worker? 1 [ 1 If you find this exercise difficult, try instead imagining how your past self of a year ago would react to…
9757
Starlink Mini as a failover
I recently picked up a Starlink Mini to use as a backup connection for my home network. The underlying technology is fascinating - thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit delivering broadband almost anywhere. With the new £4.50 standby plan, it's an excellent way to keep things online.
9758
The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.
9759
Gmail Icons are Hard
nikitonsky: Default mode for GMail action panel is icons. Icons are great: they take little space, don’t need to be translated. Only one caveat: more often than not there’s no good, well-understood icon for your action.
9760
Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
9761
Why do USB-C hubs still have USB 2.0 ports? (2021)
[If USB2.0 is too boring, learn about the details of 50 different Thunderbolt-4 docks – yep you read that right, there are 50 different models – find out which ones are identical inside…
9762
9763
The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
The most talented data engineer I know, and my first manager, is a man that loves cooking. I mean, you might think you love cooking, but this guy loves cooking. The most excited text message I received this year was from him, proudly sharing the goddamn analytics on the heat distribution of chicken in his oven with…
9764
You did no fact checking, and I must scream
I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which…
9765
I don't want to fill out your contact form
This is my personal blog, where I write solely in my personal capacity. It does not represent the positions of any organisations I'm associated with.
9766
9767
A modest critique of Htmx
At work, we really like the basic simple idea of Htmx. Based on using Htmx in a non-trivial user interface, across a team, we’ve found that the following cases are actually not simple and are quite complicated.
9768
A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…
9769
9770
Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
9771
Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
9772
9773
9774
German police name alleged leaders of GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups
An elusive hacker who went by the handle “ UNKN ” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion…
9775
Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?
We usually perceive that it costs more to get higher quality, but software internal quality actually reduces costs.
9776
Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see
How mindless consumption is making our FYPs worse.
9777
Gift card gang extracts cash from 100k inboxes daily
Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email…
9778
The differences between tinkering and research (2016)
Some of us have academic degrees and fancy university jobs, and publish peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals. Let's call these peopl...
9779
I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
How one unchecked login token put 17 trillion rows in a Microsoft internal analytics service within reach.
9780
Why does gRPC insist on trailers?
gRPC comes up occasionally on the Orange Site , often with a redress of grievences in the comment section. One of the major complaints people have with gRPC is that it requires HTTP trailers. This one misstep has caused so much heartache and trouble, I think it probably is the reason gRPC failed to achieve its goal…