Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,242 posts.
The Style Guide for America’s Highways
Driving across America, you will encounter a wide variety of cultures, landscapes, people and animals. But the one consistent thing that will stay the same from Maine to California are the signs you pass on the highway. That is because America’s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide.
A Pipeline Made of Airbags
Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.
Black Swan Seed Rounds
I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really...
A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm
You don’t bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn around a PC and device maker.
Heroes of Might and Magic V – Hammers of Bait and Switch
This documents my process of finding a fix for the “Original game not found” problem when installing Heroes of Might and Magic V: Hammers of Fate from Ubisoft. For the actual fix, pleas…
"Yes, but what are your credentials, Mr Stross?"
Normally I don't publish private correspondence, but sometimes — rarely — I feel like hanging someone out to dry ...
Edward Snowden and Gen Y: a sign of leaks to come?
(Before I begin: there are participants in the discourse who would say that we're supposed to natter on about Edward Snowden , and not the contents of his disclosures, because turning it into a personal issue rather than a political one is useful to the machineries of state. But the point I'm about to make here is…
Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs
How I leveraged AI tools like Cline to enhance the UI/UX of a website and streamline backend tasks. From redesigning pages and translating content to navigating the benefits and challenges of AI-assisted development, this blog post highlights the potential of using large language models to boost productivity while…
Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode
Rahul's Blog
Why I'm writing a Scheme implementation in 2025: Async Rust
I really love Rust. I’ve been using it as my language of choice for about ten years now. I believe that it is a remarkably well designed language, and that includes the parts that are often most criticized, most notably async.
Setting Up an Ad-Blocking VPN with WireGuard and Pihole
This guide will walk you through the setup of a remote machine that will act as a personal VPN server at the cost of 3 to 5 USD per month. We will also configure it to act as a DNS resolver that will automatically block spam, tracking, advertising and malware domains on all of your connected devices.
Hacking the Casio F-91W to Handle 1000 Psi
The Casio F-91W is one of the most iconic watches of the past few decades. It’s notoriously cheap, reliable, and retro; in fact, it’s probably the only watch that was worn by both Obama and Osama . At just under $10, it’s the perfect daily beater watch. And in the age where you need to charge your Apple Watch every…
FreeBSD ate my RAM
I spent a whole month researching FreeBSD's kernel's virtual memory system to understand why tools like htop, btop and fastfetch report different information about RAM usage. I ended up submitting patches to all of these projects.
My new favorite vim/tmux bug
This week, I'm grateful that my coworkers know to come grab me if something seriously weird is going on, because it...
Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars
How to turn 256 bits of entropy into a beautiful, avatar-friendly circular SVG: the Hashvatar.
Found a program I wrote in 1981 and decided to bring it back to life
When you find a weird program from four decades ago and realize that it's yours.
Performance Testing HTTP/1.1 vs. HTTP/2 vs. HTTP/2 and Server Push for REST APIs
When building web services, a common wisdom is to try to reduce the number of HTTP requests to improve performance.
Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking
In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less.
Zig language server and cancellation
I already have a dedicated post about a hypothetical Zig language server. But perhaps the most important thing I've written so far on the topic is the short note at the end of Zig and Rust.
Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
I have been doing angel investing since 2012 after the Facebook IPO. Since then I have invested in more than 150+ startups. 50+ of them…
Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office
A few months ago I moved to a few acres in the country, and needed somewhere to work - so I built myself a solar powered off grid office out of a Tuff-Shed Pro Studio! On one side, I’ve built a great desk corner with plenty of power and more than enough AC to keep me cool when it’s over 100F out.
Whatever works for you
In my earlier 20s when I knew everything, I was a much bigger evangelist for my technology choices. I’m accused of fanboyism a lot more these days, but only because Hacker News keeps sending huge waves of people here who tell me I’m an idiot. But I used to be much more annoying with pushing my choices onto others.