1381
Final post on Javascript crypto
The talk I gave last year on common crypto flaws still seems to generate comments. The majority of the discussion is by defenders of Javascript crypto. I made JS crypto a very minor part of the tal…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
1382
ha ha only serious
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…
1383
Viktor T. Toth
This page contains a JavaScript calculator of Hawking radiation and other parameters of a Schwarzschild black hole.
1384
(Emacs) Keyboard Shortcuts for Editing Text Fields in OS X
A comparison of Emacs and OS X keyboard shortcuts for editing text.
1385
the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism
In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…
1386
How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
1387
Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
1388
Amazon's Dynamo
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
1389
bliki: Frequency Reduces Difficulty
"If it hurts - do it more often". Good advice if the amount of pain raises exponentially with the time between actions, such as for integrating software.
1390
Time-Nuts -- Precise Time and Frequency for Amateurs
Time-Nuts ™ is a mailing list for amateurs who are interested in precise Time & Frequency. Topics include stability of quartz oscillators, measurements of rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, using WWVB, Loran-C, and GPS for long-term comparisons.
1391
Minimum Viable Product: a guide
One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product . Its power is matched only by the amount of confusi...
1392
Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
1393
1,000 True Fans
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
1394
1395
Book Review: The Hungry Brain
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
1396
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
1397
Simplify: move code into database functions
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1398
Units of measure
Type safety for numerics
1399
My Experience With the Great Firewall of China
When I recently visited China for the first time,as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at theGreatFirewall of China with m...
1400
Prototypal Inheritance
Five years ago I wrote Classical Inheritance in JavaScript ( Chinese Italian Japanese ) . It showed that JavaScript is a class-free, prototypal language, and that it has sufficient expressive power to simulate a classical system. My programming style has evolved since then, as any good programmer's should. I have…
1401
Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…
1402
The Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
1403
Saint IGNUcius
Stallman is a saint in the Church of Emacs—Saint IGNUcius. I bless your computer, my child! (jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
1404
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
1405
Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting
David Fifield, University of California, Berkeley Chang Lan, University of California, Berkeley Rod Hynes, Psiphon Inc Percy Wegmann, Brave New Software Vern Paxson, University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute
1406
Radicalizing the Romanceless
[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…
1407
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ
Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of…
1408
A Guide to Branching in Mercurial / Steve Losh
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
1409
Waiting for PostgreSQL 12 – Allow user control of CTE materialization, and change the default behavior.
This is pretty important change, as it has the chance to cause performance issues in some cases.
1410
Introduction
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.