3181
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,799 posts.
3182
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
3183
3184
Get me out of data hell
It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.
3185
Two HN Announcements
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
3186
3187
Young children would rather explore than get rewards
Young children will pass up rewards they know they can collect to explore other options, a new study suggests. Researchers found that when adults and 4- to 5-year-old children played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest…
3188
3189
Spymarks, not Watermarks
Watermarks that spy on users are no mere watermarks
3190
Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019
Almost nine years ago, Cloudflare was a tiny company and I was a customer not an employee. Cloudflare had launched a month earlier and one day alerting told me that my little site, jgc.org, didn’t seem to have working DNS any more.
3191
EU citizens’ rights are under threat from anti-encryption proposals
Along with Threema, Tresorit, and Tutanota, we are releasing a joint statement calling on the EU to reject any ban or attack on end-to-end encryption.
3192
Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle
This week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced that a 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle was just solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than MIT scientists expected.
3193
Difftastic, the fantastic diff
programming, language design, and human factors
3194
WebKit will delete all local storage after 7 days
Apple will delete your data if you don’t use an app for seven days. This effectively kills offline web apps.
3195
Dead Internet Theory
I had a wierd experience which made me realize that the internet is probably dead.
3196
A graph that should be front-page news
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
3197
Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don't see the problem...
3198
How I code with AI on a budget/free
A personal guide on using AI Code Prep GUI, Cline, and various free AI web interfaces like Gemini, Grok, Deepseek, and Poe for cost-effective coding and debugging.
3199
Functorio
You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and …
3200
Krita 4.0 – A painting app for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
3201
3202
How to build quickly
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]
3203
3204
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢…
3205
3206
React I love you, but you're bringing me down
We've come a long, long way together. You changed. Where do we go from here?
3207
Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Are they good or bad?
3208
Short session expiration does not help security
When logged into a web application, the session does not remain valid forever. Typically, the session expires after a fixed time after login, or after the user has been idle for some time. How long should these times be?
3209
Why is it so hard to give Google money?
I’ve been trying to run search ads on Google for over a month. Due to two unrelated snags, I’ve only had ~12 hours of uptime with those ads in that time. Based on conversations with other startups that run Google Ads, my experience is neither unique nor surprising. Apropos of Google’s earnings day, I wanted to vent a…
3210
Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots
searchmysite.net was designed to be a search engine free from SEO spam, but now almost all traffic comes from SEO spammers.