Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 2,470 posts.

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2403

Why getting traction is so hard these days

The end of the cycle One of the best essays written last year was Elad Gil’s End of Cycle? – referencing our most recent 2007-2017 run on mobile and web software, and the implications for investing, startups, and entrepreneurs. Although he doesn’t directly talk about it, the end of a tech cycle has major implications…

2407

Two-part Rubik's algorithms

When Rubik’s Cube first appeared decades ago, I jumped on it. I bought one, and spent an entire summer fiddling with it. Over that summer, I developed a solving technique that has stuck with me. My technique is not the fastest; that was never the goal. My algorithms make sense to me because they are constructed, and…

2409

Implementing VisiCalc (2003)

I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…

2411

Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…

2420

The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)

There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…

2423

The qmail security guarantee

Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…