I recently went through the HN posts I upvoted/saved this year and maybe someday will get around summarizing the ones that taught/inspired me the most...here are two technical ones that stuck out for me:
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris...
This to me was the epitome of a great HN post: the author decides he wants to learn how to build Chrome extensions and implement WebSockets and builds a chat app from scratch. It becomes a runaway hit and he leaves it alone, only to rediscover later that it developed into its own online civilization of sorts.
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society. http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris... This to me was the epitome of a great HN post: the author decides he wants to learn how to build Chrome extensions and implement WebSockets and builds a chat app from scratch. It becomes a runaway hit and he leaves it alone, only to rediscover later that it developed into its own online civilization of sorts.
How We Nearly Lost Discovery http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost... A former NASA engineer describes how Discovery nearly ended up as tragedy, and "how I found out that we were never really as smart as we thought we were."