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Even the LastPass Will Be Stolen
How to obtain encryption keys to decrypt the LastPass vault in different scenarios
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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How to zero a buffer
Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Xbox 360 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Sana'a
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
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Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
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Learn difficult concepts with the ADEPT method (2014)
After a decade of writing explanations, I've simplified the strategy I use to get new concepts to click. Here's how to teach yourself a difficult idea, or…
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Design of This Website (2021)
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
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LLVM for Grad Students (2015)
LLVM is a godsend of a research tool. Here are some detailed notes on what LLVM is, why you would want to use it for research, and how to get started as a compiler hacker.
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Bpftrace for Linux 2018
bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018: the bpftrace front-end
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If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste t...
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Doom engine code review
Before studying the iPhone version, it was important for me to understand how Doom engine WAS performing rendition back in 1993. After all the OpenGL port must reuse the same data from the WAD archive. Here are my notes about Doom 1993 renderer, maybe it will help someone to dive in. January 13th, 2010 : Reddit…
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Crafting Interpreters: 640 Pages in 15 Months
My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago . But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it . You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little…
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Adding a fiber link to my home network
Motivation Despite using a FTTH internet connection since 2014, aside from the one fiber uplink, I had always used network gear with 1 Gbit/s links over regular old rj45 cat5(e) cables. I liked the simplicity and uniformity of that setup, but decided it’s time to add at least one fiber connection, to get rid of a…
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How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
A short story about Lisp, technology, and human progress.
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The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
Around the end of high school, I started to get really into photography. My friend (let’s call him T) was also into it, which should have been great fun. But it wasn’t. Going shooting with him was never great, for a reason I didn’t figure out till much later. I wanted to take photos. T mostly enjoyed tinkering with…
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Postgres 9.2 will feature linear read scalability up to 64 cores
Remember when I blogged about linear read scalability out to 32 cores ? Well, the awesome Nate Boley provided me with access to his brand n...
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Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
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Reflections on Rusting Trust
The Rust compiler is written in Rust. This is overall a pretty common practice in compiler development. This usually means that the process of …
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