Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,235 posts.

Any topic
Any year
19605

Modern CPUs have a backstage cast

If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…

19610

Koch method to learn Morse

The Koch method is based on exposing the student to full-speed Morse from day one. The first lesson starts with just two characters, played in full speed. The student must "copy" them (i.e. writing them down or typing them, like in this page). Once 90% of the characters are correctly "copied", the student can go move…

19612

Soup – Alan Kay on Objects

As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…