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The media's lab leak fiasco
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 506 posts.
302
Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/S IO on a Single ThreadRipper Workstation
TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now…
303
25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build
init7 recently announced that with their FTTH fiber offering Fiber7, they will now sell and connect you with 25 Gbit/s (Fiber7-X2) or 10 Gbit/s (Fiber7-X) fiber optics, if you want more than 1 Gbit/s. While this offer will only become available at my location late this year (or possibly later due to the supply chain…
304
Early-Retirement Update
I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to create a new entry on a blog that has essentially been dead since 2015. Yet, I have had a persistent feeling that I owe my readers an update.
305
Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
306
Excel Never Dies
The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies
307
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
308
Playstation 3 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
309
Flatpak Is Not the Future
Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux…
310
CPM MagnaCut
CPM MagnaCut is a new stainless knife steel designed to be better than anything that has been available before. Is it a success?
311
Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
312
Gitlet.js – Git implemented in 1k lines of JavaScript (2015)
I wrote Gitlet to show how Git works under the covers. I wrote it to be readable. I commented the code heavily.
313
Home-Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope (2015)
Scan Head STM Tips Vibration Isolation Electronics Software Scans Image Gallery Useful Links This project is my attempt to build a low-cost scanning tunneling microscope (STM) capable of atomic res…
314
Turing Oversold?
It is not the fault of Turing, though.
315
Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with
This post contains my own opinions, not the opinions of my employer or any open source groups I belong or contribute to.
316
How to learn mathematics: the asterisk method
All original material on the geometry.org website is Copyright (C) 1999–2025, Alan U. Kennington.
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RCE in Visual Studio Code's Remote WSL for Fun and Negative Profit
The Visual Studio Code server in Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a local WebSocket WebSocket connection to communicate with the Remote WSL extension. JavaScript in websites can connect to this server and execute arbitrary commands on the target system. Assigned CVE-2021-43907 and zero bounty. I paid 5 USD for the EC2…
320
How to Learn Nix
It's like a Let's Play, but for obscure software documentation. I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.
321
Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
322
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
323
“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
324
Complexities of e-mail validation logic
Nope, you don't know how to validate an email address. Even if you think you'd get the domain part right, fuggeddabout the local part. Seriously.
325
Apple Silicon Hardware: SPRR and Guarded Exception Levels (GXF)
Over a year ago siguza published a write-up about Apple’s APRR - a custom ARM extension that redefines pagetable permissions and protects certain parts of the kernel from itself. Since then Apple has released their M1 chip which not only features an updated version of APRR but also easily allows to run bare-metal code…
326
Tracking One Year of Malicious Tor Exit Relay Activities (Part II)
>25% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users
327
So you want to write a GUI framework
Through several recent discussions of GUI programming in Rust,I have been left with the impression that the term ‘GUI’ means significantlydifferent things to...
328
Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat
I've worked on many projects throughout my career as a software engineer. However, Helix - Uber's Rider app rewrite in 2016 introducing Swift and RIBs - stands as the craziest project by a margin. This is my story and some of my journal entries from the time. Prologue It's
329
Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents' forums (2015)
This page doesn’t apply to all estranged parents, only to estranged parents who are members of estranged parents’ forums. Read why.
330
Rust Is the Future of JavaScript Infrastructure
Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?