Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 3,824 posts.

Any topic
241

How does Shazam work? (2022)

Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam , does it. The founders of Shazam released a paper in 2003 documenting how it works, and I have been working on an implementation of that paper, abracadabra .

250

Discord is not documentation

I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of…