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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,273 posts.

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2024
4591

Where is all of the Fediverse?

Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…

4598

Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday

I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past…

4602

X is justifiably slow (2022)

I regularly hear or read statements like this: “X is slow but this is to be expected because it needs to do a lot of work”. It can be said about an application or a component in a larger system, and can refer to other resources that aren’t time. I often find these profoundly unhelpful as they depend much more on the…

4618

Python extensions should be lazy

Python's memory model is a performance bottleneck. Gauge is solving the monolith/microservices dilemma. We’re building tools to untangle codebases through incremental modularization. Our open-source toolkit supports defining and enforcing rules for interfaces and dependencies. By focusing on high cohesion and loose…