1981
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,456 posts.
1982
1983
How To Take Exceptional Notes and Be Productive with Paper
Learn how a former Google PM transformed his productivity with an analog note-taking system. A practical guide to effective paper-based organization for startup leaders.
1984
1985
Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions
Quick summary of my recommendations on compare-by-hash: If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years. For example, BitTorrent falls into this category, but rsync doesn't. Keep in mind that new…
1986
1987
Devops Horror Stories
Keep users informed during incidents with Statuspage. Share real-time status updates, reduce support tickets, and build trust through transparency.
1988
1989
1990
What are Linux containers and how did they come about?
Today's announced collaboration between Red Hat and dotCloud , the company behind Docker, is exciting for a lot of reasons. As the release n...
1991
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
1992
1993
Hackers can be business guys, and other lessons from Paul Graham
Spent most of this evening reading YC applications. We ask applicants to record themselves for about a minute with their cofounders just so we can get a sense for who they are in person. We fire up...
1994
1995
Why education startups do not succeed
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…
1996
1997
1998
1999
Why You Make Less Money
Have you ever had a conversation with a fellow technologist that you felt wasn’t quite at your skill level, and at some point you discovered that she/he makes $20,000 more than you do? $50,00…
2000
Getting a job in San Francisco
You’re living outside the US and want to get a job in San Francisco? This might help you getting one.
2001
2002
2003
F-1 Engine Recovery
Thanks to the conservation team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Apollo F-1 artifacts are ready for display. A few weeks ago the first shipment of artifacts arrived at The Museum of Flight here in Seattle, and I joined museum president Doug King, adjunct curator for space history Geoff Nunn, and…
2004
2005
2006
2007
Bitcoin is Worse is Better
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
2008
2009
The keys to the keydom
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
2010
LinkedIn's Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs
At Greylock, my partners and I are driven by one guiding mission: always help entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or whether we’re casually meeting for the first time.