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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.

Systems & Performance
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4477

Terminals Are Weird

Terminals 1 are quite weird. Most modern users assume that they can just have straightfoward keybindings. Right? To bind Ctrl+i to something, they listen for Ctrl+i in their application. If they want to bind Ctrl+Shift+i to something different, they certainly can, they just listen for Ctrl+Shift+i as well. Naturally…

4489

Decompressing a Gzip File by Hand

2024 Update: Part 2 is out! Let’s make a gzipped file and see what’s in it. We’ll keep it simple: just write 8 ‘a’s to a file. $ echo "aaaaaaaa" > test.out $ xxd test.out 00000000: 6161 6161 6161 6161 0a aaaaaaaa. As we can see, our file is 9 bytes long. We have 8 ‘a’ bytes written, plus a Line Feed (LF) character…