Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 4,838 posts.

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44

This Page is Designed to Last

The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.

46

Fast

San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…

49

Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

Browser fingerprinting is a hidden way websites and third parties can identify your web browser based on a mix of device details, settings, and system characteristics. Firefox helps prevent browser fingerprinting with built-in protections designed to reduce that tracking and give you more control over your online…

51

Thank You, Guido

After six and a half years, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is leaving Dropbox and heading into retirement. From the beginning, we knew Guido would be a great addition to our company. In fact, his contributions to Dropbox date back to day one. Our CEO Drew Houston’s very first lines of code for Dropbox were…

53

Startup idea checklist

I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match…