4351
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4352
Mercurial’s journey to and reflections on Python 3
Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008.
4353
4354
The most dangerous code in the world
Abstract: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications. Security of SSL connections against an active network attacker depends on correctly validating public-key certificates presented when the connection is established. We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is…
4355
This is why people fear the Internet of Things
Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware. Now imagine that the geek gear you bought doesn’t actually…
4356
Fukushima
When I visited Chernobyl 7 years ago, I didn’t think that a similar disaster could take place anywhere ever again, and certainly not in Japan.
4357
4358
Playstation 3 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
4359
Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
4360
Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
4361
Effective Rust (2021)
A collection of specific ways to improve your use of Rust
4362
4363
Thunderstrike – Apple EFI firmware vulnerability
31C3 presentation on the Thunderstrike firmware vulnerability in MacBooks
4364
Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea
Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t e…
4365
Making Python faster with Rust
Update: I gave a talk on this topic at P99 CONF 2023 and at PyCon IL 2024 (Hebrew). A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python …
4366
Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Most command line programs that offer line editing -- like bash, Python, GDB, psql, sqlite and more -- do so using GNU readline. Readline's a powerful library that grants history, completion, movement and editing to programs that use it --- and a stable and consistent set of keyboard shortcuts. Shame, then, that even…
4367
Banking in uncertain times
We may be in the early stages of a banking crisis: why, what we're doing to avoid it, and what we may not get about it.
4368
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…
4369
4370
The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life
Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administ
4371
MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
4372
Workplace surveillance is coming for you
If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege…
4373
Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
The recent paper, “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors by Jiang et al. [ link ] recently received a lot of attention on twitter.
4374
4375
Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
4376
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?
4377
4378
Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?
Here are some of the best techniques for keeping email addresses hidden from spammers—along with the statistics on how likely they are to be broken.
4379
4380
Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…