Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
Sd: My Script Directory
does your ~/bin spark joy?
Minsky Moments in Venture Capital
Markets rise, and markets fall. This much, at least, is well-known. But why do market cycles occur? What causes the pendulum to swing from euphoria to crisis and back? Hyman Minsky was a 20th-century economist whose ‘financial instability hypothesis’ is probably the best-known explanation for the boom and bust cycles…
Serial swatter who caused death gets five years in prison
A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.
A shallow survey of formal methods for C code
Two interesting things in formally verified software happened recently. The big one was the release of SeL4 - a formally verified L4 microkernel. The second was much smaller, but closer to my usual scope: a paper which showed the correctness of sections of a couple of the assembly implementations of Curve25519.
Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, Spec-Kit, and Tessl
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
AEADs: getting better at symmetric cryptography
I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at the Yahoo Unconference . The conference was at the end of a particually hard week for a bunch of reasons and I fear that the talk wasn't that great. (Afterwards I got home about 3pm and pretty much slept until the following morning.) This post is a, hopefully clearer…
How to Pay Professional Maintainers
To successfully fund Open Source projects, companies should: pay the maintainers; pay them real money; pay for maintenance; and keep paying them.
Guys what is wrong with ACATS
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
Rob Pike on regular expressions in lexing and parsing
Comments extracted from a code review. I've been asked to disseminate them more widely. I should say something about regular expressio...
Jepsen: Crate 0.54.9 version divergence
In the last Jepsen analysis, we saw that RethinkDB 2.2.3 could encounter spectacular failure modes due to cluster reconfiguration during a partition. In this analysis, we’ll talk about Crate, and find out just how many versions a row’s version identifies.
Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (2011)
2013 Update: I was young and stupid when I wrote this. I fear that Haskell is doomed to succeed. — Tony Hoare I ♥ Lisp. I think it's t...
Modern C is now feature complete
You find the latest version of my book at the usual place at This now contains all the material that I plan to put into it. New are “experience” parts about performance, function-like m…
Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
The European Commission versus Android
Examining the history of Android explains why the European Commission may be right to fine Google for its actions around Android, even as the reasoning feels off.
Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003)
For 2003 OSCON I proposed to give nine five-minute talks in a 45-minute slot. To avoid confusing this with the real lightning talks sessions, Nat decided to call my talk ``Nine Views of Mark Jason Dominus''. At first I didn't like that title, which sounded too much like self-promotion. But I warmed up to it after a…
The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
Assange Hearing Day 10
The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New…
So You Want To Optimize Ruby
I was recently asked for a list of