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Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4052
The Map Is Not the Territory (2015)
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
4053
Making art with SSH key randomart
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
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The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)
[ This is not mine. I posted it in the interest of personal archival because the oldest mention I could track down on the web appeared on a now-defunct weblog . In the meantime, Mike W. Cremer (who bills himself The Newton™ Scapegoat ☺ ) has claimed credit for coining it after a particularly frustrating DMA debugging…
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Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
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Generate ASCII RFC-like header diagrams for your own custom protocols
Protocol is a command-line tool to display ASCII RFC-like protocol header diagrams for both existing network protocols or user-defined ones (using a very simple syntax). Protocol is written in Python and it's open-source software.
4058
IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude
A few years ago I wrote [_The World in Which IPv6 was a Good Design_](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810). I'm still proud of that article, bu...
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Is Design Dead? (2004)
The rise of agile methods (particularly XP) makes some people wonder if there's any role left for software design. I argue that this change shifts from planned to evolutionary design.
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A Unikernel Firewall for QubesOS
QubesOS provides a desktop operating system made up of multiple virtual machines, running under Xen. To protect against buggy network drivers, the …
4061
The Computer Graphics Library
Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…
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TLS Symmetric Crypto
At this time last year, the TLS world was mostly running on RC4-SHA and AES-CBC. The Lucky 13 attack against CBC in TLS had just been published and I had spent most of January writing patches for OpenSSL and NSS to implement constant-time CBC decoding. The RC4 biases paper is still a couple of week away, but it's…
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FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
4064
MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
4065
History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
4066
ZeroMQ - Disconnects are Good for You
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
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The "it" in AI models is the dataset
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. More than anyone really has any right to train. As I’ve spent these hours observing the effects of tweaking various model configurations and h
4068
Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
You may have heard last week how Innokenty Mihailov’s great Enumerable::Lazy feature was accepted into the Ruby 2.0 code base. But you may not have heard about an even more significant change that was merged into Ruby 2.0 in January: a new algorithm for garbage collection called “Bitmap Marking.” The developer behind…
4069
Tagged Pointer Strings
Tagged pointers are an interesting technology used to increase performance and reduce memory usage. As of OS X 10.10, NSString got the tagged pointer treatment, and today I'm going to take a look at how it works, a topic suggested by Ken Ferry.
4070
The Apprentice Programmer (2013)
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
4071
Compile-Time Evaluation in the Zig System Programming Language
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
4072
The Geometry of Color Perception
The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color: (1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry ; (2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L , M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram ; and (3) the…
4073
Burnout
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.
4074
On Hubris and Humility
Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Firmware Conference about some of the work I’m doing at Oxide Computer, entitled On Hubris and Humility. There is a video of the talk if you’d like to watch it in video form. It came out pretty alright!
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Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font (2009)
VT220 TrueType font
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The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
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