Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,218 posts.
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
This article assumes you’ve already heard about the aCropalypse vulnerability, aka CVE-2023-21036. If not, go read about it here (oops, this page doesn't exist yet. Read this tweet in the meantime).
Great to see you back Steve! I'm sorry to hear about your hand troubles, and glad that there's a 95% approval rating. The interweb just got slightly better again. Welcome back.
Have you ever asked yourself this question: "How many times can I assemble LEGO bricks before they wear out?" Well... probably never but I...
I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.
This weekend I went to BSides SF 2023 and had a blast. I went to some really interesting talks (including an excellent one about adversarial machine learning), but mostly I spent my time solving CTF hacking challenges. And this time, I did it with the help of GPT-4, the
Script-injected scripts block on CSS and delay script execution. Their era has passed, and we now have a much better, cleaner, and faster solution: add an async attribute to your script tags.
I am now officially part of the "previous" generation of programmers. I know this because the new generation no longer has "vi vs. emacs" e...
About a year and a half ago, my mother’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live. Since then it has been treatments, pain, and truly miraculous victories - but the word “terminal” is pretty clear; at some point you will lose. I flew home as soon as things started to take a…
Steve Sanderson's Blog
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Patching LLVM Flang to output WebAssembly objects.
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
I got an email today, a bit sad that the bot I made to comment on Tower Bridge's state had disappeared.
There are a lot of posts out there about identifying and hiring 10x engineers. And a lot of discussion about whether or not these people even exist. At Spool, we’ve taken a very different app…
Recently, we told you that California pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Bob Duggan — a man currently worth $2.3 billion — had, through an agent, complained to Google about a story we wrote about him.
Daala is a next-next-generation video codec being developed at Mozilla Research and Xiph.Org . The aim is not only to create a better video codec, but to create one that is a royalty-free open standard that can serve as the backbone technology for video on the internet.
Charlie Park believes in you.
Discuss this post on Hacker News. Conventional wisdom for doing a startup as a young entrepreneur these days is something like the following: 1.Drop out of
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
Large downloads work from all other servers, but fail from S3. Must be a problem on their end, right?
Projects and Ramblings
Since the introduction of the Nvidia RTX graphics cards last summer, ray tracing is back again. In the last months, my Twitter feed flooded with a continuous stream of RTX On / RTX Off comparisons. After seeing so many nice
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
