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Storing Passwords Securely
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
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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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
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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?
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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Go 1.7 toolchain improvements
This is a progress report on the Go toolchain improvements during the 1.7 development cycle. All measurements were taken using a Thinkpad x220, Core i5-2520M, running Ubuntu 14.04 linux.
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"The web is considered 'public domain'"
The tl;dr version of this post: My 2005 Ice Dragon entry, called "A Tale of Two Tarts" was apparently printed without my knowledge or permission in a magazine and I am apparently the victim of copyright infringement. The story: I was contacted early last week by a friend of mine who lives in the…
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Notes from the Meeting on Python GIL Removal Between Python Core and Sam Gross
During the annual Python core development sprint we held a meeting with Sam Gross, the author of nogil, a fork of Python 3.9 that removes the GIL. This is a non-linear summary of the meeting.
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Reading the Silk Road configuration
Many of us believe it wasn't the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believ...
4569
The category design pattern
A programming design pattern inspired by category theory
4570
Google bug bounty for security exploit that influences search results
Short version: For the $12 cost of a domain, I was able to rank in Google search results against Amazon, Walmart etc. for high value money terms in the US. The…
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Why do new cars look like wet putty?
"Wet Putty" whips are everywhere. What’s behind it? ... a BBSP investigation
4572
Viewing Matrices and Probability as Graphs
Today I'd like to share an idea. It's a very simple idea. It's not fancy and it's certainly not new. In fact, I'm sure many of you have thought about it already. But if you haven't—and even if you have!—I hope you'll take a few minutes to enjoy it with me. Here's the idea: Every matrix corresponds to a graph. So…
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The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
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Designing a programming language to speedrun Advent of Code
“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?” yeah, probably. I even considered submitting it to the AoC contest. time is a real beast. The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out…
4576
The tyranny of the wagon equation
A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
4577
WordPerfect for UNIX (1992)
I found this interesting print-ad for WordPerfect for UNIX, apparently the best UNIX product of 1992! (Very) Belated congratulations Corel!
4578
Four features that justify a new Unix shell
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
4579
An Alternate Universe (Microsoft Surface)
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
4583
Vmail - A Gmail client in Vim
Why Vmail? Because some people are 1000 times more productive and happy in Vim than in any web browser or GUI program.
4584
Why I'm Making Python 2.8
For the past two months I've been spending half my time on Tauthon . Tauthon is a backwards-compatible Python interpreter that runs Python 2 code and C-extensions exactly as-is, while also allowing Python 2 programmers to use the most exciting new language features from Python 3. These new backported language features…
4585
Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
4586
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to…
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TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)
An exploration of the layout models of TeX and Typst.
4588
Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
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Write More Classes
Furthermore I am of the oppinion that Python developers should write more classes.
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Jack Daniels writes the politest cease and desist notice ever.
Learn why professors appreciate storytelling in essays and how students can use narrative techniques to write stronger academic papers. Practical tips and examples included.