Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 546 posts.

Tools & Productivity
2022
66

Saying “sup” with `net send`

When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school network. AIM and similar services were blocked, but if we wanted to send messages to each other we could open up the Command Prompt and type something like: net send lab2126-24 test and get an…

69

Shortest URLs on the Internet

What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me. But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at…

70

Settings are not a design failure

The systematic thinking in our industry is that settings are the result of design failure. As designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustment by the user. So offering customization options is often seen as a failure to make firm product decisions. I think there is a…