Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 16,893 posts.

Tech Industry & Business
Any year
9973

How My Mom Thinks Search Engines Work

For those of you who have been doing SEO for awhile now, think back to when you first started pitching ideas to bosses, client lists, or other members of your marketing team. If you remember a few blank stares and responses like, "Don't most people just search for our brand name if they want to…

9986

Clever ideas that failed (2010)

The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…