Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,862 posts.
How Discord handles over a million requests per minute with Elixir’s GenStage
This is the story of how we assessed and refactored two video players into one, cut the player code each product maintained by up to 94%, and swapped to the new player without disruption to any users.
How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know (2016)
(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works) Some years ago, I polished up and released an abandoned project for storing financial data in Django. It let you declare “Money” fields on your models, dealing with proper storage and currencies for you. My use case for the library, django-money eventually faded, but it…
YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form
On YouTube, there’s a long tail of content that pretty much guarantees the inclusion of every potential human interest. There are skate videos, makeup tutorials, and backyard surgical removals of blackheads. And yet the presentation of a lot of this content — especially when it’s trying to attract a large audience …
Building Bluesky comments for my blog
I hate disqus too much.
macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format
ASIF disk images are new in Tahoe, and promise to be space efficient, as they’re sparse files, and almost as fast as the disk they’re stored on. Ideal for VMs and general use.
MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
A few words on Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain.
Migrating from Supabase
Our journey from Supabase to Postgres and Render
Announcing the data.gov archive
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.
A year of funded FreeBSD development
For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't…
A new JSON data type for ClickHouse
We’re excited to introduce our new and significantly enhanced JSON data type, purpose-built to deliver high-performance handling of JSON data. Our core engineer, Pavel Kruglov, dives into how we built this feature on top of ClickHouse's columnar storage.
What Startups Are Really Like
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the…
My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
Blue Ocean: a new user experience for Jenkins
Jenkins – an open source automation server which enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software
How I use Tailscale
I’ve been using Tailscale for around four years to connect my disparate devices, servers and apps together. I wanted to talk a bit about how I use it, some cool features you might not know about, and some stumbling blocks I encountered.
As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes
Fitting as much Stack Overflow as possible into 4096 bytes
How to sleep at night having a cloud service: common architecture do's
I like to sleep, but more importantly, I like to sleep while my cloud service is running.
1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2026!
Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…