🔥 Read this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 💡 Key idea: Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087.1 The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 transistors, depending on the source.2 To explore how the 8087…
🚀 Check out this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Main takeaway: On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system…
✨ Explore this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Main takeaway: Big Tech’s so-called Magnificent Seven are on everyone’s lips. The exorbitant stock market valuations of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and Tesla provoke an amalgam of awe and fear. Their trillion-dollar investments in AI prompt some to predict the brightest of futures and others to dread humanity’s dumbing down, unemployment, redundancy even. In this overwhelming din, it is easy to miss the larger picture: a new type of capital is killing markets, capitalism’s habitat. At its very beginning, capitalism was underpinned by faith in competitive…
💥 Read this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Main takeaway: The BBC's new drama series The Musketeers – adapted from Alexandre Dumas' novel Les Trois Mousquetaires – made its debut on Sunday evening. Ahead of the screening, Dr Simon Kemp, Oxford University Fellow and Tutor in French, tackled the curious question of why the musketeers appear to have an aversion to muskets..."So here it comes. Peter Capaldi – Malcolm Tucker as was, Doctor Who as shortly will be – is twirling his moustache as Cardinal Richelieu in trailers for the much-heralded BBC adaptation of Alexandre Dumas'…
✨ Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: Rant ahead: I hate TLS “Inspection” software with a burning passion and I wish we collectively as an industry would just knock it the fuck off and stop pretending it’s some great security benefit. Every time I encounter it, in whatever form, it’s a gigantic headache that makes everyone’s life worse off and as far as I am concerned offers next to zero tangible benefits. For those blissfully unaware, this is a class of “security” software or appliance that is supposed to let organisations…
🚀 Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Key idea: There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995). I ran into it in 2003 and was very impressed, but it's now 2025 and this tutorial is still being mentioned quite often in Hacker News threads. Why is that? Why does a tutorial from 35 years ago, built in Pascal and emitting Motorola 68000 assembly - technologies that are virtually unknown for the new generation of programmers -…
💥 Explore this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Here’s what you’ll learn: Dependable C, is an attempt to document a subset of C for developers who want to write Dependable C.
C23, and the upcoming C2Y are language versions that have become increasingly complex, include many new keywords, flow control, and a revised Charter that differs from "Classic C". Later versions of C are also only supported by 2 implementations out of the hundreds of C implementations available. The Delta between ANSI C and C2Y is arguably larger than the Delta between ANSI C and…
💥 Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 💡 Main takeaway: I have spent twenty years working on open source sustainability, so watching a fight ignite between Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg this week felt uncomfortably familiar in a way I wish it didn't. David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source. People quickly pointed out that the O'Saasy license that Fizzy is released under blocks others from offering a competing SaaS version, which violates the Open…
💥 Check out this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: 📌 Key idea: 📢 Update (2025/12/09): All icons used in the error page have been fully redrawn as vector assets. These icons along with the stylesheet are also inlined into a single file of the error page, eliminating any need of hosting additional resources and ensuring better experience for you and your end users. What does this project do? This project creates customized error pages that mimics the well-known Cloudflare error page. You can also embed it into your website. Here's an online editor to create customized error…
✨ Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Here’s what you’ll learn: In its first six months, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing scheme has reduced air pollution by 22% in Manhattan’s toll zone, while improving air quality across the entire metropolitan region, according to new research. The Cornell University study analysed data from 42 air quality monitors throughout the New York area between January 2024 and June 2025, tracking PM2.5 concentrations before and after the January 2025 launch of the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ). The findings provide the first rigorous evidence that charging drivers to…
