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Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
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How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
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Defending a website with Zip bombs
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
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Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security
I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is
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Things Every Hacker Once Knew
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
336
How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails
Did I mention how awesome it is to live 30 minutes from a ski lift?In March of 2016, I launched a course called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Sinc...
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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Kotlin Is Better
I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.
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The Kolmogorov option
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
340
There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…
341
Engineering management lessons (2014)
Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started.
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How a 64k intro is made
The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.
343
Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
344
Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
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Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
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Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing
You might have used Google’s new AMP project without even knowing. It’s a technology that makes mobile page results load very quickly on Google, it
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YC Annual Letter 2017
Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most...
349
Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
350
Writing a Bootloader
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
351
P vs. NP
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
352
An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device
With slick marketing, catchy taglines and some pretty bold claims about their security, nomx claim to have cracked email security. Let's see if they have.
353
What we need from Apple to make standalone Apple Watch podcast apps
The Apple Watch desperately needs standalone podcast playback, especially with the LTE-equipped Series 3, which was designed specifically for exercising without an iPhone.
354
Minimal PDF
Most PDF files do not look readable in a text editor. Compression, encryption, and embedded images are largely to blame. After removing these three components, one can more easily see that PDF is a human-readable document description language.
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Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
358
The Marketing Behind MongoDB
Countless NoSQL databases competed to be the database of choice. MongoDB's marketing strategy helped it become the winner.
359
How I learned to program
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible…
360
Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
In this blog post, I would like to introduce the JavaScript Binary AST, an ongoing project that we hope will help make webpages load faster, along with a number of other benefits. A little background Over the years, JavaScript has grown from one of the slowest scripting languages available to a high-performance…