Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 716 posts.
When Java was first introduced, mainstream programming languages mostly either compiled to standalone executables (e.g. C/C++, COBOL), or else ran in an interpreter (e.g. Perl, Tcl). For many programmers, Java’s need for both a bytecode compiler and a runtime interpreter was a shift in thought. The compilation model…
We’ve calculated Backblaze’s storage durability at 99.999999999%. What does that impressively large number mean, and does it actually matter for your data?
An integral part of Facebook’s engineering culture has always been our development work on open source solutions that solve real-world production issues and address key challenges in modern l…
The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm teaches your computer how to riff. The algorithm takes in an archetypical input, and produces procedurally-generated outputs that look like it.
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
LLVM is a godsend of a research tool. Here are some detailed notes on what LLVM is, why you would want to use it for research, and how to get started as a compiler hacker.
bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018: the bpftrace front-end
This blog post is a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer architecture community have experienced. We are sharing these experiences in…
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts. For over a year, the React team has been working to implement asynchronous rendering. Last month during his talk at JSConf Iceland, Dan unveiled some of the exciting new possibilities async rendering unlocks. Now we’d like to share with…
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
MongoDB is a long-time user of Jepsen . Over the past three years, Jepsen has performed several analyses for MongoDB, and MongoDB has integrated an expansive Jepsen test suite into their CI system. In March, MongoDB requested Jepsen perform an analysis on a previously untested configuration: sharded clusters. We also…
Amazon’s face surveillance technology is the target of growing opposition nationwide, and today, there are 28 more causes for concern. In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people…
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
Update July 10th: Last week Monday, prosecution stated that they will keep our things for further analysis, even after explicitly confirming to journalists that they are aware that our only connection to Riseup is the collection of donations. This includes items belonging to our partners, and other third parties like…
Bufferbloat is high latency (or lag) that occurs when there’s other traffic on your network. This means that your network isn’t always responsive - it’s wasting your time.
Over the few last hours, a dozen news stories have broken about how an attacker attempted (and perhaps managed) to steal cryptocurrencies using a BGP leak.
Internally our DDoS mitigation team is sometimes called "the packet droppers". When other teams build exciting products to do smart things with the traffic that passed through our network, we take joy in discovering novel ways of discarding it.
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean…
That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change
Nim is a relatively new programming language which allows users to write easy-to-read high-performance code. But if you are reading this Nim tutorial, the chances are that you already know about Nim.
The newly-released GraalVM changes the status quo in the realm of JVM-based programming languages. In this instalment we’ll explore its impact on Clojure. We’ll start small, but by the end we’ll compile an entire Ring web application into a self-contained native binary.
Removing (most of) the software stack from the cloud Clive is an operating system designed to work in distributed and cloud computing environments. It’s main design guidelines are: Ther…
