Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 359 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
19

Why Should I Start a Startup?

A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: 1. The vast majority of startups are not successful 2. For talented technical people, it’s relatively easy to get a job and make a large salary 3. Large companies offer opportunities to work on very difficult…

20

Just Say No

I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of…

27

Flickr – A Year Without a Byte

One of the largest cost drivers in running a service like Flickr is storage. We’ve described multiple techniques to get this cost down over the years: use of COS , creating sizes dynamically on GPUs and perceptual compression . These projects have been very successful, but our storage cost is still significant. At the…

28

Rejection Letter

I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more…