Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,021 posts.

Networking & Internet
Any year
2942

How to Read an RFC (2018)

Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more significantly …

2953

The problems with url shorteners

URL shortening services have been around for a number of years . Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. Addendum: They're useful in print , too. But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer…

2965

Advanced SSH Techniques

At one site where I provide technical assistance, access to the network is all done via ssh over the Internet. However, one can't get access to the machines directly; one must first make an ssh connection to a gateway box I'll call martha. martha doesn't allow one to use regular passwords or keys, though. We're all…