1891
What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. The most vital question everybody’s asking themselves is: What’s …
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,185 posts.
1892
The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025
Who were the most popular personal bloggers of 2025, and what made them successful on Hacker News?
1893
I bricked my Christmas lights
Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...
1894
Installing every* Firefox extension
Oh, you use Firefox? Name every extension.
1895
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
1896
The next Google
DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.
1897
1898
Always Be Quitting
A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job 😱. But act as if you might leave on short notice 😎. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities. A thread 👇.
1899
Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
1900
A visual introduction to big O notation
A visual introduction to big O notation.
1901
My Friend Aaron
This one is about my friend, Aaron. I met him at school, and in our first year when we were eleven years old I told him I wanted to be his best friend but he…
1902
Web fonts, boy, I don't know
Monica Dinculescu's blog
1903
I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year
What do I actually do with my time? How productive am I? I logged everything I did in 2020 and got some pretty cool data out of this.
1904
The hunt for the missing data type
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
1905
1906
AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Agents made implementation cheap, so I started doing far more of it in parallel. My GitHub history since 2019 shows what that did: as VP of Technology I am back at my full-stack engineer pace, with bursts, burnout and a low season that is no longer low.
1907
Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
You surely know this: You're looking at some website with some useful shell commands. However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them). So, what do you do? You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
1908
Local First, Forever
We explore how to build local-first sync on top of simple file storage
1909
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
1910
“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
1911
My second year without a job
Reflecting on two years of unemployment: personal growth, financial lessons, and creative pursuits like music and startups. Here's how I navigated year two without a job.
1912
1913
What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
1914
1915
We're Baking ‘Have I Been Pwned’ into Firefox and 1Password
Pretty much every day, I get a reminder from someone about how little people know about their exposure in data breaches. Often, it's after someone has searched Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and found themselves pwned somewhere or other. Frequently, it's some long-forgotten site
1916
I hacked my car
Note: As of 2022/10/25 the information in this series is slightly outdated. See Part 5 for more up to date information. The Car Last summer I bought a 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL. It is a nice fuel-efficient hybrid with a decent amount of features like wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, wireless phone charging, heated…
1917
HTML Tips (2020)
20 HTML tips with examples: mailto and tel links, opening links in a new tab, lazy loading, a native accordion, range sliders, download links and more.
1918
Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…
1919
I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
How an expired nameserver let me take over e164.arpa zones for multiple territories, and why I probably should have checked my logs sooner.
1920
Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps
Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don't want to publish your app on the Appstore. The provisioning certificate that Xcode provides only lasts one week.