Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,219 posts.
UPDATE: Just to make this explicitly clear: I did not write this program. The fourth sentence makes this fairly clear, but some comments indicate that some people are a bit lazy :). I also added a video of the rush to the bottom.
Spoiler alert: many of the good projects didn’t survive
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
Yik Yak is an anonymous, controversial social media application that allows people to make posts that are visible to other users within ~2 miles. Often landing a top 10 spot in the iOS App Store, this app has become increasingly popular with high school and college students. Due to the anonymous nature of the app…
Scott Mabin's blog
I learned about socat a few years ago and am generally surprised more developers don’t know about it. Maybe I appreciate it all the more…
This post is a guest post from my friend Brian Sharp My post before this was a kind of therapy / Buddhism / personal growth kind of deal, but I also spend a lot of time thinking ab...
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead.
Epistemic Status: Resident Expert I’m a little late on this, which was an old promise to Robin Hanson (not that he asked for it). I was motivated to deal with this again by the launch of Augu…
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo, a pair of researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, have found a finite configuration in Conway’s Game of Life such that, if it occurs within a universe a…
There are currently a number of attempts to deploy a cryptocurrency-based decentralized storage network, including MaidSafe, FileCoin, Sia a...
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
You may have seen isolation levels in the documentation for your database, felt mildly uneasy, and went on with life. Few day-to-day examples of using transactions really mention isolation. Most use the database’s default isolation level and hope for the best. It’s a fundamental topic to understand however and you’ll…
If you had told me in April 2026 one question “Mehmet, can we use managed PostgreSQL for this project?” would send me into the deepest rabbit hole of my life, I would have laughed. Months later, I finally found the bottom of that rabbit hole. It was a 22-year-old zero-day in PostgreSQL core. In this […]
I own a very old ‘flat’ screen television from 2009. One of the reason this TV is still kicking around is because I have a strange sentimental affection for it. Another is that I have written automation for it that works really well and it would be a pain to migrate away from it.
Linear Algebra Geometric Algebra Applications Multiplying Vectors Rotors Double Angle Formula Complex Numbers Characterizing B Ratios Conjugates Geometric Algebra is fascinating, and I believe solves a large number of problems that arise from a more traditional approach to vectors, but I've been very disappointed with…
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
Using modern brute force approach to improve image quality on retro computers, by Arnaud Carré
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences , and the…
