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Top Ask HN stories from all time

all-time year month week

1.

You Are Not Google (2017) (blog.bradfieldcs.com)

1623 points by gerbilly 2019-04-04 | 572 comments

2.

Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) (josephg.com)

1519 points by charlieirish 2017-04-11 | 996 comments

3.

Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016) (answers.microsoft.com)

1423 points by wielebny 2017-03-22 | 469 comments

4.

Diamonds Suck (2006) (diamondssuck.com)

1336 points by Tomte 2016-11-13 | 576 comments

5.

Immersive Linear Algebra (2016) (immersivemath.com)

1269 points by reverse 2019-02-27 | 140 comments

6.

Advanced Data Structures (2017) (courses.csail.mit.edu)

1176 points by rjammala 2019-05-29 | 83 comments

7.

Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf] (djm.cc)

1080 points by Pamar 2017-04-20 | 188 comments

8.

Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf] (ourway.keybase.pub)

1057 points by rodmena 2019-05-30 | 158 comments

9.

Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015) (immersivemath.com)

1015 points by sebg 2017-03-19 | 74 comments

10.

Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014) (idlewords.com)

988 points by jmduke 2015-07-21 | 233 comments

11.

You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video] (youtube.com)

957 points by carlesfe 2016-09-07 | 420 comments

12.

We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016) (danluu.com)

910 points by indy 2017-10-31 | 625 comments

13.

IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016) (www.rogerschank.com)

904 points by dirtyaura 2018-04-30 | 435 comments

14.

Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922) (mikecanex.wordpress.com)

866 points by Tomte 2017-05-25 | 316 comments

15.

Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016) (www.cbc.ca)

834 points by colinprince 2019-01-09 | 284 comments

16.

How SQL Database Engines Work, by the Creator of SQLite (2008) [video] (www.youtube.com)

813 points by zbaylin 2018-06-24 | 129 comments

17.

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908) (507movements.com)

798 points by dvt 2019-05-21 | 147 comments

18.

Windows 93 (2014) (www.windows93.net)

790 points by hxw 2016-10-12 | 113 comments

19.

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) (www.propublica.org)

787 points by apsec112 2017-03-12 | 439 comments

20.

Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017) (cstack.github.io)

783 points by AlexeyBrin 2019-04-05 | 88 comments

21.

The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013) (plus.google.com)

782 points by adrianmsmith 2014-05-15 | 234 comments

22.

How I went from programming to consulting (2012) (training.kalzumeus.com)

780 points by putnam 2017-12-23 | 472 comments

23.

Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014) (setosa.io)

779 points by aogl 2018-08-15 | 68 comments

24.

Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012) (nytimes.com)

763 points by ValentineC 2018-02-20 | 721 comments

25.

European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016) (www.sciencemag.org)

756 points by Tomte 2017-06-17 | 102 comments

26.

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000) (www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca)

753 points by kornish 2017-01-08 | 133 comments

27.

How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015) (syntheti.cc)

751 points by pvsukale3 2016-08-29 | 340 comments

28.

Forgotten Employee (2002) (sites.google.com)

747 points by bgar 2013-07-23 | 291 comments

29.

“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in” (2017) (www.theregister.co.uk)

746 points by peter_d_sherman 2019-02-04 | 393 comments

30.

To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008) (www.wired.com)

740 points by colinprince 2018-08-07 | 208 comments

31.

The shittiest project I ever worked on (2013) (blog.plover.com)

732 points by luu 2019-05-24 | 296 comments

32.

Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) (svelte.dev)

720 points by nailer 2019-05-18 | 331 comments

33.

The Wrong Abstraction (2016) (www.sandimetz.com)

717 points by LopRabbit 2018-07-20 | 207 comments

34.

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011) (archive.mensjournal.com)

708 points by dave1619 2012-12-26 | 331 comments

35.

Your own company? You can do it (2011) (jacquesmattheij.com)

701 points by oliv__ 2017-06-18 | 366 comments

36.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) (johnsalvatier.org)

699 points by rgun 2018-01-19 | 294 comments

37.

There's no speed limit (2009) (sivers.org)

699 points by tnorthcutt 2012-03-27 | 194 comments

38.

Magnasanti: Large and Terrifying SimCity (2010) (rumorsontheinternets.org)

690 points by ingve 2018-04-26 | 153 comments

39.

Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016) (www.washingtonpost.com)

687 points by anythingnonidin 2017-09-19 | 367 comments

40.

Write yourself a Git (2018) (wyag.thb.lt)

684 points by adamnemecek 2019-03-14 | 108 comments

41.

Why you should learn just a little Awk (2010) (gregable.com)

684 points by mason55 2018-06-15 | 244 comments

42.

Avoid Else, Return Early (2013) (blog.timoxley.com)

682 points by signa11 2018-03-26 | 578 comments

43.

“Just remove the duck” (2013) (rachelbythebay.com)

682 points by tarikozket 2015-03-03 | 327 comments

44.

H.264 is magic (2016) (sidbala.com)

680 points by dpeck 2019-05-24 | 180 comments

45.

Surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes (2016) (www.cbc.ca)

677 points by navinsylvester 2018-03-29 | 306 comments

46.

The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012) (www.windytan.com)

675 points by bpierre 2017-11-06 | 103 comments

47.

Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015) (www.cbc.ca)

674 points by colinprince 2019-02-20 | 330 comments

48.

YAML: probably not so great after all (2017) (arp242.net)

673 points by tlb 2018-06-20 | 394 comments

49.

The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017) (jaycarlson.net)

670 points by howard941 2019-05-07 | 195 comments

50.

Fucking Sue Me (2011) (pud.com)

663 points by dsr12 2013-09-11 | 194 comments

51.

Foundations of Databases (1995) (webdam.inria.fr)

662 points by tosh 2019-04-23 | 52 comments

52.

We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012) (stackoverflow.com)

661 points by ambuj 2013-08-01 | 236 comments

53.

How to Study Mathematics (2017) (www.math.uh.edu)

661 points by kenny87 2018-02-16 | 148 comments

54.

Tron Legacy (2010) (jtnimoy.net)

657 points by rsingla 2013-01-21 | 143 comments

55.

Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000) (www.cs.otago.ac.nz)

656 points by andrewl 2019-04-21 | 380 comments

56.

Amazon Web Services in Plain English (2015) (www.expeditedssl.com)

655 points by apsec112 2017-01-20 | 75 comments

57.

How are zlib, gzip and Zip related? (2013) (stackoverflow.com)

652 points by yurisagalov 2016-06-17 | 138 comments

58.

Computer Graphics from Scratch (2017) (www.gabrielgambetta.com)

651 points by pcr910303 2019-04-05 | 94 comments

59.

Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922) (mikecanex.wordpress.com)

650 points by mikecane 2012-12-26 | 162 comments

60.

24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012) (xiph.org)

647 points by Ivoah 2017-08-29 | 428 comments

61.

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014) (www.righto.com)

642 points by dvt 2017-12-18 | 156 comments

62.

Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016) (mzucker.github.io)

639 points by pablode 2018-03-12 | 70 comments

63.

How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017) (www.c0ffee.net)

638 points by j_s 2018-01-26 | 325 comments

64.

It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014) (www.schneier.com)

638 points by dyoder 2015-02-25 | 133 comments

65.

Startup Playbook (2015) (playbook.samaltman.com)

634 points by navinsylvester 2019-01-16 | 55 comments

66.

Curse Of The Gifted (2000) (www.vanadac.com)

632 points by luu 2014-02-11 | 356 comments

67.

H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017) (www.propublica.org)

631 points by bajsejohannes 2018-04-15 | 232 comments

68.

When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015) (news.nationalgeographic.com)

626 points by reimertz 2016-07-20 | 228 comments

69.

Color Night Vision (2016) [video] (kottke.org)

625 points by Tomte 2017-04-07 | 156 comments

70.

NirSoft Freeware (2008) (www.nirsoft.net)

625 points by valgaze 2018-04-16 | 232 comments

71.

“Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012) (harmful.cat-v.org)

624 points by behnamoh 2016-08-22 | 552 comments

72.

Why do many math books have so much detail and so little enlightenment? (2010) (mathoverflow.net)

620 points by mathgenius 2017-05-15 | 260 comments

73.

I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017) (www.huffpost.com)

617 points by ilamont 2019-04-29 | 443 comments

74.

Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017) (blog.rekawek.eu)

617 points by tosh 2018-05-23 | 95 comments

75.

50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016) (www.npr.org)

614 points by deegles 2019-01-18 | 274 comments

76.

Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016) (tatiyants.com)

612 points by insulanian 2017-07-23 | 48 comments

77.

I’m a very slow thinker (2016) (sivers.org)

604 points by gary__ 2018-08-06 | 224 comments

78.

Learn C and Build Your Own Lisp (2014) (www.buildyourownlisp.com)

603 points by AlexeyBrin 2018-07-07 | 86 comments

79.

Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big (2013) (www.chrisstucchio.com)

598 points by tosh 2017-05-23 | 352 comments

80.

The Art of Command Line (2015) (github.com)

597 points by axiomdata316 2019-05-23 | 169 comments

81.

Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf] (cses.fi)

594 points by linouk23 2018-04-29 | 121 comments

82.

The Myth of RAM (2014) (www.ilikebigbits.com)

593 points by ddlatham 2016-08-29 | 277 comments

83.

Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008) (news.cnet.com)

592 points by bconway 2013-06-07 | 299 comments

84.

Useful Mental Models (2016) (www.defmacro.org)

586 points by Mougatine 2018-01-08 | 73 comments

85.

When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017) (www.bicycling.com)

586 points by edward 2019-01-26 | 261 comments

86.

How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) (freedom-to-tinker.com)

586 points by ColanR 2016-12-17 | 257 comments

87.

Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (2014) (ai.google)

576 points by amzans 2018-06-18 | 88 comments

88.

How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018) (medium.com)

572 points by rodneyg_ 2019-06-04 | 206 comments

89.

Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015) (nautil.us)

571 points by dnetesn 2017-11-26 | 200 comments

90.

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016) (www.gwan.com)

569 points by josephscott 2018-04-26 | 333 comments

91.

Life is Short (2016) (www.paulgraham.com)

568 points by hvo 2018-04-01 | 184 comments

92.

It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015) (edw519.posthaven.com)

568 points by Mz 2016-12-06 | 287 comments

93.

Legends of the Ancient Web (2017) (idlewords.com)

567 points by panic 2018-01-09 | 111 comments

94.

What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016) (www.gianlucagimini.it)

566 points by dlazar 2018-08-06 | 187 comments

95.

How I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015) (web.stanford.edu)

562 points by tjalfi 2017-04-29 | 133 comments

96.

Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016) (danluu.com)

562 points by derek 2018-01-03 | 106 comments

97.

How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censor Google results (2017) (www.lumendatabase.org)

560 points by rinze 2018-09-30 | 117 comments

98.

The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015) (www.vitavonni.de)

558 points by xg15 2018-05-16 | 426 comments

99.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2003) (spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu)

558 points by teeray 2018-05-04 | 157 comments

100.

History of the browser user-agent string (2008) (webaim.org)

558 points by jesperht 2018-03-05 | 168 comments

Last Update 2022-09-18 00:05

Created by Daniel E. Cook

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