Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
How tech companies make money and why it's important
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.
Although it might seem that AI will make it pointless, I still think it's worth blogging.
For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from…
Libsodium is now 13 years old!
For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
TLDR: my bank sent out emails with websites which looked a lot like phishing mails, so much so that this similarity could potentially be used against them legally by potential phishing victims Discussion at hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44592377 Chapter 1: You’ve got mail As I was writing my first…
blog - kade killary
You are the sum of your behaviors not your intentions
I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick…
For the past two weeks or so, I've been working on constructing the Taylorator. The Taylorator is a piece of software which allows me to flood the FM broadcast band with Taylor Swift's music. No matter where you tune your radio, you will only be able to listen to her!
Ladybird is a relatively new browser engine originating from the SerenityOS project . Currently, it’s in pre-alpha and improving quickly. Take a look at the website and the GitHub for more information!
This article looks at how different types of shoes can affect game development and examines how games deal with this in practice.
Why Apple Just Killed the iPhone Interface (And What Comes Next)
Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get
(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.) A few moons ago I was thinking of ways to take my Palm OS Fossil Wr...
I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
And some novel ideas for bicycle wheel design.
For the last 6 months, I’ve been spending my (limited) free time on evenings and weekends writing a WebAssembly VM in C. After repeatedly throwing away small side-projects, this was an extremely productive experience for me as an engineer. I’m writing this in order to put together some take-aways and organize my…
While preparing for my Black Hat and DEF CON talks in July of this year, I found the most impactful Entra ID vulnerability that I will probably ever find. One that could have allowed me to compromise every Entra ID tenant in the world (except probably those in national cloud deployments). If you are an Entra ID admin…
Why owning your own domain and publishing on the open web beats renting attention from Reddit, Discord, Facebook, and other mega-concentrated platforms.
In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today , here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025 .
YAGNI, or, You aren't gonna need it , is a standard piece of advice that warns against over engineering and building too many features too early. I think its great and saves you from wasting time, which can kill a project.
In the spirit of my thermostat and dishwasher controller , I managed to cobble together a decent blinds opener in a short weekend almost entirely from spare parts on hand. This design is very much what I could do quickly with what I had, so probably not worth copying, but perhaps it can be an inspiration.
I’ve been watching the Zig language for a while now, given that it was created for writing audio software (low-level, no allocations, real time). I never paid too much attention though, it seemed a little weird to me and I didn’t see the real need. Then I saw a post from Andrew Kelley (creator of the language) on…