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The Emacsification of Software
Everything looks like Emacs now: personal, complicated, idiosyncratic, and shrink-wrapped around exactly what you want it to do. Does shipping software even make sense in the long run?
Thomas Ptacek
Thomas and Erin Ptacek on software, security, cryptography, hiring, and the occasional cocktail.
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Visit sockpuppet.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jul 2013 – Sep 2026
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2
Stop Making TUIs
It's time to stop drawing user interfaces with punctuation characters. Native UI is a completely solved problem.
3
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
4
Vulnerability research is cooked
Vulnerability discovery has always been gated by elite attention. Elite attention is now abundant. What happens next?
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Applied Cryptography Engineering
Applied Cryptography taught two generations of developers what they know about crypto, and it is a dreadful instruction manual. The book to replace it with, and what you still have to learn after.
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How To Safely Generate A Random Number
Use urandom. That is the whole answer. Why the entropy-depletion story is a myth, and why userspace CSPRNGs are behind most of the last decade's randomness disasters.