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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.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
5582
Write a Shell in C (2015)
A tutorial on how to write a Unix shell in C.
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Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
Six propositions for evaluating the evidence.
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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.
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LLMs aren't world models
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
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Recovering secret keys from devices using video footage of their power LED
Exploiting a Video Camera's Rolling Shutter to Recover Secret Keys from Devices Using Video Footage of Their Power LED
5591
The Generative AI Con
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
5592
Simpson’s Paradox (2016)
A riveting tale of how good data can lead to bad decisions.
5593
What I Learned From Increasing My Prices
Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It…
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A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
5595
Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…
5596
Zero Cost Abstractions
Rust claims to enable abstraction without overhead. How does that claim hold up in practice?
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Why "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" matters (2011)
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
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The Microsoft MFA system almost brought me to a nervous breakdown
Update 12/10/21, 10:15 UTC: I never imagined this post would reach the front page on Hacker News and gather so much support. Thank you all…
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Embedded in Rust: Brave new I/O
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
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Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again
With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map. Daniel Worthington-Bodart
5602
Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the...
5603
Age Reduction Breakthrough?
If you eschew hyperbole and hang in for the long haul, maintaining a discipline of understatement in the midst of a flashy neon world, you may be offered a modicum of credence when you make an extraordinary announcement.
5604
Image Kernels explained visually
An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They're also used in machine learning for 'feature extraction', a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the…
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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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Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
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Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust
A detailed look at the frameworks, concurrency model, error handling, middleware constructs, and testing strategies of a web service written in Rust.
5610
The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.