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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.

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20117

USB On-The-Go

USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the…

20120

The Undercover Generalist

Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist. I’ve been wanting to write about it for years and even have kept some notes for that purpose. Recently I came across an article by Ben Collins-Sussman…

20124

Lists

For as long as the web has been around, there have been entrepreneurs trying to build businesses around lists. And I’m having a tough time thinking of any company that has really nailed it in this category. For one thing, there are two modes of listmaking; making lists for yourself (task management) and making lists…