Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,219 posts.
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
I've been using SQLite in several production projects for six months, and I've encountered some surprising aspects.
Earlier quite a few iDOS users and supporters reached out to me to let me know about the recent AppStore policy change (Thanks, EU). In light of this, I decided to resubmit iDOS. However, it looks like Apple has blacklisted iDOS 2, preventing me from even requesting a review under that title, and I had to submit under…
TL;DR – be wary of buying a Lenovo laptop or any other laptop that uses a Synaptics touch pad until Synaptics ships a fixed driver. Their driver has a memory leak and they have a battery-life bug t…
I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that…
An not-for-profit roundup of affordable PCB manufacturers. Originally published in 2023 and last updated January 2026.
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
Introduction I have around ~50k GitHub stars. I’ve come up with a bullet-pointed actionable list of how to make open-source projects popular. One of the projects I created had 67 lines of code and had only existed for 3 days before it hit 1.7k stars. Humans
Welcome Hacker News, Slashdot, DF and TechMeme. Be sure to read the follow up ...
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
The first year where I managed to keep my focus entirely on a single project.
More than a million domain names — including many registered by Fortune 100 firms and brand protection companies — are vulnerable to takeover by cybercriminals thanks to authentication weaknesses at a number of large web hosting providers and domain registrars, new research finds.
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working off-and-on on a little side project. The idea is that there are lots of people that are not in a position to visit a university or that don't have a public library with 'access' at their disposal but that do need to be able to read scientific papers. Ever since the…
Learning new programming languages will expose you to new ways of thinking; especially if the new language uses a paradigm which you aren’t yet familiar with. Many of the ways of thinking that you will learn can be applied to languages that you already know, and you might even want to start using the new language for…
Sweet, sweet humidity.
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
One of my favorite phrases is “Do things, tell people”. I came across it in Carl Lange’s eponymous post and could instantly relate.
In this post we will implement a data compression program in about 150 lines of Haskell. It will use Huffman coding and handle arbitrary binary files using constant memory for encoding and decoding.
Thinking about UX, a slight delay on a simple tooltip can be nice so that mousing over something quickly doesn't trigger it, but if there are related tooltips nearby, maybe we don't need to wait.
Just when you thought it couldn't be crazier in Redmond, today they are ...
In November 2020, SFWA came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
Crossposted on Naked Capitalism I just finished reading Nate Silver’s newish book, The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t. The good news First off…
I work in product growth helping people discover and use great software, currently at SurveyMonkey. In the past I've done it at Prismatic (acq. by LinkedIn), Clara Lending (acq. by Sofi), Right Side Up, Hubstaff. I've also enjoyed consulting with interesting companies like DoorDash, Empower, StitchFix, Calm, Dell…
Last week, while working on new features for our product, I had to find a quick and efficient way to extract the main topics/objects from a sentence. Since I’m using Python, I initially thoug…
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
