Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,893 posts.
Eytzinger Binary Search
This tutorial is loosely based on a 46-page paper by Paul-Virak Khuong and Pat Morin “Array layouts for comparison-based searching” and describes one particular way of performing efficient binary search by rearranging elements of a sorted array in a cache-friendly way.
ChaosDB Explained: Azure's Cosmos DB Vulnerability Walkthrough
This is the full story of the Azure ChaosDB Vulnerability that was discovered and disclosed by the Wiz Research Team, where we were able to gain complete unrestricted access to the databases of several thousand Microsoft Azure customers.
Prospecting for Hash Functions
Update 2022 : TheIronBorn has found even better permutations using a smarter technique. That thread completely eclipses my efforts in this article.
Eliminating cold starts with Cloudflare Workers
A “cold start” is the time it takes to load and execute a new copy of a serverless function for the first time. It’s a problem that’s both complicated to solve and costly to fix.
How to design an elliptic-curve signature system
Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news . The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by…
Binary Lambda Calculus (2020)
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.
Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office
Remember the Bionic Office? Fog Creek moved in there in 2003. After a couple of years we had outgrown the first office so we expanded to take over the whole floor. By the time our lease ran out in …
VC Insanity, Explained
…or, why VCs do what they do (Note: this post also appeared as a guest post on Techflash) VC behavior sometimes looks insane, but generally it’s just sound economics. It’s crazy but true: if you know how a VC gets paid, you can pretty much read their mind. Here’s a few examples: VCs don’t actually seem to want to take…
Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
Go At Heroku (Doozer)
Two Heroku system engineers discuss their experiences using Go.
Web SQL Database: In Memoriam
All signs seem to indicate that Apple will finally ship IndexedDB in Safari 7.1 sometime this year. This means that Safari, the last holdout against IndexedDB,…
Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end
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Porting to Python 3 Redux
Some updated tips for porting software to Python 3.
Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
Pelicans on a bicycle
I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like …
The Apple goto fail vulnerability: lessons learned (2014)
Description of what we have learned
Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
GPG and Me (2015)
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
The Just-World Fallacy
The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it. The Truth: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often g…
Martian Headsets
You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon…
Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.