1
Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 80 posts.
2
Two Hard Things (2009)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
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The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
4
Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
5
The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
6
Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time
How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out! You can use * for wildcards, foo|bar for sums, and a word is defined as \<[[:alnum:]_]+\> (ignoring case, considering accents).
7
The Ruby community has a DHH problem
The Ruby community can no longer afford to stand silent in the face of DHH and his toxic ideas.
8
Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.
10
AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
11
There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
12
My LLM codegen workflow
A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.
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Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
14
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
15
Problems with Go channels (2016)
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
16
Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
17
Modern C
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
18
Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
19
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
20
Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
21
Beware of Fast-Math
One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…
22
The RubyGems "Security Incident"
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
23
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The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
25
The Expression Problem and its solutions (2016)
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
26
How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Hey… quick question, why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
28
Bloom Filters by Example
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
29
A critique of package managers
n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The StandupPackage managers (for programming languages) are evil.11 The term “evil” is being used partially hyperbolic to make a point.To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers…
30
No Graphics API
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.