Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 532 posts.
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…
Back in 2008, I wrote some software for fun to generate various optimized walking mechanisms. And when I also picked up some electronics and wood working skills in more recent years, I was able to turn one of these mechanisms into an actual wireless walking wooden coffee table: the Carpentopod. This post briefly…
After Snowden’s whistleblowing in 2013, large parts of the internet became encrypted, enabling private and secure communication. Not everyone has welcomed this change. Most notably, the FBI and other U.S. government agencies have fought what is often called the “crypto wars”, the war on encryption. In recent years…
Is Product Hunt worth it? Dive into the data to find out.
Ceph is an open source distributed storage system designed to evolve with data.
A tale about exploiting KernelCTF Mitigation, Debian, and Ubuntu instances with a double-free in nf_tables in the Linux kernel, using novel techniques like Dirty Pagedirectory. All without even having to recompile the exploit for different kernel targets once.
The Bun Shell is a cross-platform shell that allows you to run shell scripts in JavaScript & TypeScript
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
Smudge.ai is a Chrome extension that gives you ChatGPT-powered shortcuts in your right-click menu.
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
Inaugural blog post about the development of turbopuffer, a search engine that uses object storage and SSD caching for cost-effective, low latency search. This post describes into the motivation behind its creation, its unique architecture, and how it significantly reduces costs for large-scale vector searches…
An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write laws.
Update: This post has been updated to clarify the scope of the compelled assistance provisions and the broad nature of criminalization and electronic evidence gathering. The final version of the draft convention can still be used to expand the reach of repression under the pretext of combating...
On 17 January 2024, the Government of the Czech Republic approved the material "Restarting the implementation of DNSSEC and IPv6 technologies in the state administration". On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032. Thus, the Czech Republic…
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
This post is not going to be about what’s wrong with individual databases. There are so many databases and so many individual API issues, operational problems, and arbitrary limitations that it wou…
Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake , but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a…
Arc is our company-building immersion for pre-seed and seed stage companies. This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.
I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three…
Update: We are diving deep into the Google API leak and what it means for marketers in our next episode of SparkToro Office Hours on June 27. Join Michael
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep , an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity…
NumPy 2.0.0 is the first major release since 2006. It is the result of 11 months of development since the last feature release and is the work of 212 contributors spread over 1078 pull requests. It contains a large number of exciting new features as well as changes to both the Python and C APIs.
Today, we’re open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets a team of moderators or curators collaboratively review reports, create labels, and inspect content on the atproto network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for users to run their own independent moderation services.
It's not often that you find yourself staring at code that few people have ever seen, code that was an important part in bringing down the a...
Private Cloud Compute (PCC) fulfills computationally intensive requests for Apple Intelligence while providing groundbreaking privacy and security protections — by bringing our industry-leading device security model into the cloud. To build public trust in our system, we’re making it possible for researchers to…
Reflecting on my most successful open source project.
