20011
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.
20012
Things to know before starting a Patreon page
For the three years starting in April of 2017, I ran much of The Prepared’s (and ultimately my family’s) income through Patreon. I started doing so as an experiment - one that by any measure has been a success. But while Patreon was instrumental in that process, I recommend that creators not str
20013
The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it!
20014
Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
20015
How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?
The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence ‘black budget.’ There’s a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: ‘Also, we are investing in groundbreaking…
20016
Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
20017
20018
The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
20019
20020
Nginx: a caching, thumbnailing, reverse proxying image server
A month or two ago, I decided to remove Varnish from my site and replace it with Nginx's built-in caching system . I was already using Nginx to proxy to my Python sites, so getting rid of Varnish meant one less thing to fiddle with. I spent a few days reading up on how to configure Nginx's cache and overhauling the…
20021
20022
Making is show business now (2020)
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: …
20023
Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
20024
How rel=nofollow Works
Links shared on Twitter aren't surfacing in Google's Search Plus Your World because Twitter wants it that way.
20025
Why Multi-armed Bandit algorithms are superior to A/B testing (with Math)
In a recent post, a company selling A/B testing services made the claim that A/B testing is superior to bandit algorithms. They do make a compelling case that A/B testing is superior to one particular not very good bandit algorithm, because that particular algorithm does not take …
20026
The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes (2018)
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
20027
To Understand Jio, You Need to Understand Reliance
Inflections in finance and tech. Click to read The Diff, by Byrne Hobart, a Substack publication.
20028
Tweaking Stunt Island's 30-year-old 3D engine
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
20029
20030
The 40% Rule
I was catching up on Brad Feld’s blog this morning and saw that he had posted about the “40% rule” for SAAS companies. I was at the same board meeting as Brad and came away similarly impressed by the simplicity of the rule and the logic behind it. Here’s the 40% rule and it is […]
20031
Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
20032
Color Formats in CSS
CSS gives us so many options when it comes to expressing color—we can use hex codes, rgb, hsl, and more. Which option should we choose? This turns out to be a surprisingly important decision! In this article, we'll take a tour of color formats in CSS, and see which option will serve us best.
20033
Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first bad commit. At each step, you say either git bisect …
20034
Chinese app included malware to gain competitive advantage
Google says it has suspended the app for the Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo after malware was found in versions of the software. The move comes just weeks after Chinese security researchers published an analysis suggesting the popular e-commerce app sought to seize total control over affected devices by exploiting…
20035
20036
Verizon, caught red-handed
Verizon has now on multiple occasions refused to connect my Google Nexus 7 LTE tablet, though the device was publicized widely as working on Verizon and...
20037
Learning from Twitter
An issue popped up on Twitter this past week that caused the web site to be generally unusable for many users. It appears as if attempts to scroll were unbearably slow and caused the site to be unresponsive.
20038
Conway's Game of Life, but musical
Breed unique melodies with genetic algorithms! Explore Conway's musical life and cultural evolution patterns. Interactive AI music lab
20039
File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: 10 years of Ceph
This paper is by Abutalib Aghayev (Carnegie Mellon University), Sage Weil (Red Hat Inc.), Michael Kuchnik (Carnegie Mellon University), Mar...
20040
How to Minimize Politics in Your Company
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The