20041
The engineering behind Figma's vector networks (2019)
A deep dive into the world of vector networks, and the engineering challenges involved in their implementation.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.
20042
HTML Kong
There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .
20043
20044
Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
The making of a simple analog synth
20045
The CAP theorem of Clustering: Why Every Algorithm Must Sacrifice Something
No clustering algorithm is perfect and you must make a trade-off.
20046
Startup Finance for Founders – Part I, Accounting (2016)
When we started Segment , we knew nothing about business finance. My background was in aerospace engineering, and my co-founders came from computer science and design. Beyond the hilariously overcomplicated spreadsheet we used to manage grocery bills as roommates, we really had no experience in finance when we started…
20047
My biology paper in Science
Think I’m pranking you, right? You can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Fer…
20048
Understanding delete in Javascript
How the delete operator really works: property attributes, DontDelete, undeclared assignments, Gecko and IE bugs, and what ES5 strict mode changes.
20049
Dating, education, and sex ratios
Men floundering, women most affected
20050
20051
Is Web3 Bullshit?
And is that even the right question?
20052
Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked
Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million…
20053
"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso's personal website.
20054
20055
Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux
I don’t want to post yet another anti-systemd rant, but I think the ubiquity of systemd could eventually create real problems for embedded Linux. I just wish I knew what to do about it.
20056
Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
20057
JSDoc is TypeScript
In May of 2023 an internal refactoring PR from the Svelte repo made it to the front page of the Hacker News forums. The (superficially) controversial PR seem...
20058
Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd
systemd seems to be a dividing force in the Linux community. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground to...
20059
What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Stephen Wolfram explores how the number of neural connections affects capabilities like language and abstraction. How far we could go accounting for neural nets and LLMS, the fundamental nature of computation, neuroscience and the operation of brains.
20060
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
20061
20062
iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review: Scotland
The iPhone 14 Pro's 48-megapixel camera in the Scottish Highlands — hiking, biking, and boating around the Dunton Kilchoan Estate.
20063
Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
20064
Most people who buy games on Steam never play them
The amazing thing about Steam and its player base is that they buy games they aren’t going to play. More than likely the person buying your game is not going to play it.
20065
The age of Scrum is over
Scrum has given us a lot, but its time for some conscious uncoupling
20066
QEMU should move from C to Rust
Welcome Redditors and HackerNews folks! This post is getting attention outside the QEMU community, so I'd like to highlight two things that...
20067
I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
20068
"We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday."
So, the US Secret Service has issued a requirement for software that can detect sarcasm in tweets . And lo, there was much rejoicing in the land, especially among post-doc researchers looking for grant money to pursue research in algorithmic applications of semiotics with a side-line in heuristic knowledge processing…
20069
One hiring filter that works
In a fairly popular blog post, Raganwald advocates against using various heuristics while filtering out resumes. For the most part, I agree with him. Since it's hard to find good programmers, false negatives are very costly compared to the cost of a false positive (a wasted interview). But I have …
20070