Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 952 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
761

Alien Artefacts

The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts 1 , a subcategory of legacy code. I use the term to describe particularly complicated and important pieces of software written by very smart engineers that are no longer working for the company—and thus not available to support it. The…

763

The problem with federated web apps

Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built…

769

Weird things you can buy online

It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…