Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,221 posts.
Hell is a multi-threaded C++ program (2006)
What are threads? Every modern operating system has support for threads, and most programming environments provide some level of support for...
Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
The Homely Mutt
Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you're not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.
HippyVM goes to Y Combinator and fails
tl;dr; We decided to go to Y combinator with HippyVM , our high performance PHP implementation, and we did not get through after two round...
The great VC pullback of 2022
Are we witnessing a major VC pullback? Is it temporary? What does that mean for startups? Certainly the topic du jour in startup circles. Here’s what I’m seeing
Startup Ideas
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)
The human genome project was inaugurated at the beginning of the decade as an ambitious international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence of human beings and several experimental animals. The justification for this undertaking is both scientific and medical. By understanding the genetic makeup of an organism…
Folk Interfaces
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems
Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling
Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team tho…
The unprofitable SaaS business model trap
Marketo filed for IPO. They have $60m in revenues and a nice growth rate; unfortunately they're *losing* $35m/year. Why do SaaS business fall into the trap of being forever unprofitable, and what is the secret to the ones who overcome this trap?
My experience releasing failed SaaS products
Build it and they will come! In the 1989 classic: Field of Dreams an Iowa farmer has a vision to bulldoze a portion of his corn crop in…
Beware of sudo on OS X
There's a little kerfuffle going on over on HN about a newly discovered local root exploit on OS X 10.10.5 , so I thought this might be a g...
My Dream Computer
🥇 Thanks to maya.land and goofpunk for sponsoring the blog! If you'd like to learn how to support my writing and get a shoutout here every week, check the sp...
Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs
My attempt to create fast and cheap bulk storage by caching HDDs with SSDs on Linux, using standard lvmcache. Contains an introduction to LVM, RAID, and partitioning.
How to get 30k Hacker News visitors to your website
How Adriaan van Rossum drove more than 30k visitors to his website from Hacker News
Enough
I recently heard a story about a friend-of-a-friend who had a decent consulting career. Instead of leveraging his skills to make as much money as possible, he took a different approach. Each year he would accept consulting projects starting in January. His skills were in demand and so he was able to work extended…
Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as…
The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
I analyzed Stack Overflow for secrets
I analyzed stackoverflow for secrets and leaks.
Promiscuous cookies and their impending death via the SameSite policy
Cookies like to get around. They have no scruples about where they go save for some basic constraints relating to the origin from which they were set. I mean have a think about it: If a website sets a cookie then you click a link to another page on that
Media Queries are a Hack
The big buzzwords in CSS these days are “modular” and “responsive”—and for good reasons. But we’re still trying to achieve those goals with the wrong tool: Media Queries. What we really need is a tool that doesn’t exist yet: Element Queries.
BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything
Most people know BuildKit as the thing that makes docker build fast. But BuildKit is a general-purpose build framework with a programmable architecture that can produce any artifact, not just container images. Here's how it works and how I used it to build Alpine APK packages.
Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time
While building a timer app I came across a peculiarity with displaying time and found out that the iPhone timer addresses it by showing you a fake time.