Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 588 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
36

Absurd Success

So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…

39

I skipped to the ending

When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…

50

My Caste

Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…

58

It's okay to make something nobody wants

产品看起来是给用户用的,但我觉得这可能是一种假象,它实际上更像是一种自我表达。 许多表达被不同的人创造出来,经历了自然选择后,存活下来的那一个,是用户喜欢的那个。 我的意思是,这个过程是这么发生的:你做一个东西,不是“我觉得他们可能需要这个”而做,而是“我觉得这个有点意思”而做。然后,别人在使用你的产品时,感受到了与你相同的那种感受,这时他说:“我觉得这个有点意思”。 从这个角度来说,产品就像一种情绪的存储器,作者存进去,复制一千份,用户从产品中取出来。 你不能自己不含任何情感,却期望用户使用后带有情感。 我觉得即使做了个没人想要的东西,也没关系。你唯一需要做的是确保你已经完整呈现了你的情感。…