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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,221 posts.
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Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages…
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Python Asyncio
Asynchronous programming is a popular programming paradigm that allows a large number of lightweight tasks to run concurrently with very little memory overhead, compared to threads.
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Here comes the first TikTok war
Russia's invasion of Ukraine will be captured in incredible detail by smartphones and social media. This changes everything.
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Considering C99 for Curl
tldr: we stick to C89 for now. The curl project builds on foundations that started in late 1996 with the tool named httpget. ANSI C became known as C89 In 1996 there were not too many good alternatives for making a small and efficient command line tool for doing Internet transfers. I am not saying … Continue reading…
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A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
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Why Don’t We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor?
We have excellent tools to create and edit text (vim, emacs, sublime, etc.). We have pretty good tools to create and edit tabular data (excel, other spreadsheet software). We even have pretty good …
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Myths about construction
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Construction is something you probably either love or hate, depending on your commute or profession. Obviously, as a civil engineer, it’s something I think a lot about, and over the past 6 years of reading emails and comments fr
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Reasons not to use Skype (2012)
As of August, 2025, Skype no longer exists as a dis-service for actual use. However, this information about how it was unjust while it operated may still be interesting for comparison with other online dis-services and for understanding the wrongs that they often do to users.
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The Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
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Why GPT-3 Matters
The sheer scale of the new GPT-3 model is hard to overstate; it’s an entire order of magnitude larger than Microsoft’s already-massive 17B parameter Turing-NLG.[1] Loading the entire model’s weights
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No NAT November: My month without IPv4
Near the beginning of November, nixCraft posted this challenge on Mastodon, daring people to take the No NAT November challenge and disable IPv4 for the month, relying only on IPv6:
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Bye, Gemini
The Gemini protocol was a big part of my COVID-19 lockdown experience. Discovering this underground, small protocol, having long discussions on the mailing list, and most importantly for me, developing software. My terminal Gemini browser, Amfora, was my first public FOSS project, something actually intended for a…
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Facebook is other people
This is what "democratization" looks like
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Can LLMs accurately recall the Bible?
I've often found myself uneasy when LLMs (Large Language Models) are asked to quote the Bible. While they can provide insightful discussions about faith, their tendency to hallucinate responses raises concerns when dealing with scripture, which we regard as the inspired Word of God. To explore these concerns, I
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In Praise of Memorization
As I've gotten older I've started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for.
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Opendoor, a startup worth emulating
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
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The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021)
In this long article, I, being as far as I know the first outside Microsoft to have learnt how the AARD code works, explain that I condemn its form but broadly sympathise with its function.
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We need more goat sacrifices
OR: OJ A-OK
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Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)
The handling of widowed headings across pages in Apple Books is of particular concern. Since 1997, CSS has had properties to handle this, and yet browsers including Safari and Firefox still don’t support them – why not?
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How GitHub No Longer Works
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero
"AI first" leaves humans nowhere. Learn about the Bus Factor and how the launch of ChatGPT has changed the landscape on knowledge sharing.
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What does 0^0 equal? Why do mathematicians and high school teachers disagree?
Clever student: I know! $latex x^{0}$ = $latex x^{1-1}$ = $latex x^{1} x^{-1}$ = $latex \frac{x}{x}$ = $latex 1$. Now we just plug in x=0, and we see that zero to the zero is one! Cleverer …
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Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
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