Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 4,918 posts.
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
Paving the on-ramp to Java
Java is one of the most widely taught programming languages in the world. Tens of thousands of educators find that the imperative core of the language combined with a straightforward standard library is a foundation that students can comfortably learn on. Choosing Java gives educators many degrees of freedom: they can…
Announcing Pyston: an upcoming, JIT-based Python implementation
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
Kotlin/Native Tech Preview: Kotlin without a VM
We are happy to announce the first Technology Preview of Kotlin/Native that compiles Kotlin directly to machine code. The Kotlin/Native compiler produces standalone executables that can run without an
Privacy Badger Is Changing to Protect You Better
Privacy Badger was created to protect users from pervasive non-consensual tracking, and to do so automatically, without relying on human-edited lists of known trackers. While our goals remain the same, our approach is changing. It is time for Privacy Badger to evolve.Thanks to disclosures from...
Logical Induction
MIRI is releasing a paper introducing a new model of deductively limited reasoning: “Logical induction,” authored by Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen,
A New RegExp Engine in SpiderMonkey
Regular expressions – commonly known as RegExps – are a powerful and heavily used tool for manipulating strings in JavaScript. This post describes how we updated the RegExp engine in ...
An Open Letter from Freelancers at Nautilus Magazine
December 13, 2017 Dear Readers, Funders and Board Members of Nautilus Magazine, As of December 13, we are writers and editors awaiting payment from Nautilus magazine for a collective debt totalling $50,000. Some of us have been waiting to be paid for more than a year. Our numbers span many time zones, from
Turnstile: privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA by Cloudflare
Any website can use a simple API to replace CAPTCHAs with our invisible alternative, whether they’re on the Cloudflare network or not.
Voxtral – Frontier open source speech understanding models
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
Serverless Performance: Cloudflare Workers, Lambda and LambdaEdge
A few months ago we released a new way for people to run serverless Javascript called Cloudflare Workers. We believe Workers is the fastest way to execute serverless functions, but lets prove it.
HipHop VM: now at 98.5% PHP framework parity, 16% faster
On November 4th, the HHVM team went on a 3-week performance and parity lockdown. The lockdown officially ended on November 22nd. Overall, this lockdown was a...
A new approach to text rendering
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open-source
As the first announcement of Platform Week, today Cloudflare is announcing the open sourcing of the Workers runtime under the Apache-2.0 license
Postgres Count Performance
Everybody counts, but not always quickly. This post looks into how the PostgreSQL database optimizes counting. In Postgres, there are ways to count orders of magnitude faster. We’ll look at exact counts (distinct counts) as well as estimated counts, using approximation algorithms such as HyperLogLog (HLL) in Postgres.
Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"
Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the fut...
Enabling Continual Learning in Neural Networks
Computer programs that learn to perform tasks also typically forget them very quickly. We show that the learning rule can be modified so that a program can remember old tasks when learning a new one. This is an important step towards more intelligent programs that are able to learn progressively and adaptively.
PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years (2019) [video]
About a year ago the PostgreSQL community discovered that fsync (on Linux and some BSD systems) may not work the way we always thought it is, with possibly disastrous consequences for data durability/consistency (which is something the PostgreSQL community really values).
SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful (2017)
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We de…
Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB
This past Wednesday marked a milestone in the evolution of Wikimedia’s Database infrastructure: the completion of the migration of the English and German Wikipedias, as well as Wikidata, to M…
EFF: Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary
Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government. The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun...