Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 3,076 posts.

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1242

Commercial freedom

It’s easy to take for granted just how good we have it as software makers selling on the internet. This is truly a unique period in human history with unprecedented commercial freedom. It bears celebration and recognition. Let me count the ways I love thee, unregulated internet: Access t…

1251

Tarsnap outage post-mortem

When the Tarsnap EC2 instance came back online about an hour later, I found that the abrupt loss of power had resulted in filesystem corruption. As I explained in a blog post in December 2008, Tarsnap stores all user data in Amazon S3, but keeps metadata cached in EC2 . While I could not see any evidence that the…

1252

Animated GIFs the Hard Way

When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. One of the criteria was that the animations should work everywhere, from IE6 to an iPad. This ruled out two common video options, Flash and the <video> element…