Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 415 posts.
Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
The difficulty in learning Clojure does not stem from its syntax, which happens to be extremely simple, but from having to learn new methods for solving problems. As such, we'll focus on understanding the core concepts and how they can be combined to solve problems the functional way.
OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to build native OS X apps using good ol’ JS. This article covers the basics and walks through building an example app.
We need to support privacy, not for those of us who have "nothing to hide", but for bothersome people like investigative journalists and activists, without which our democracy would crumble
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
Supervisor trees are one of the core ingredients in Erlang's reliability and let it crash philosophy . A well-structured Erlang program is broken into multiple independent pieces that communicate via messages, and when a piece crashes, the supervisor of that piece automatically restarts it.
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
Bob's new eBook, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is finally available on Amazon.com.
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
Bitcoin is designed to support a wide variety of transaction types. Although currently the majority of transactions are standard payments to address it is possible to build more complex protocols.
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…
At this time last year, the TLS world was mostly running on RC4-SHA and AES-CBC. The Lucky 13 attack against CBC in TLS had just been published and I had spent most of January writing patches for OpenSSL and NSS to implement constant-time CBC decoding. The RC4 biases paper is still a couple of week away, but it's…
A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.
Developing Opinions - A blog by Jimmy Breck-McKye
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
