Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia", said Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today. He has been rightly mocked for this nonsense claim, that foreshadows moves to require online messaging providers to provide law...
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument , the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us.
Canonical log lines are a lightweight, flexible, and technology-agnostic technique for observability that are powerful and easy to implement.
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption. If…
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And…
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
Entropic Engineering was approached in January ‘24 by the DEFCON Badge Team, who were looking for a small company to partner with. They expressed that they specifically wanted to work with us as a woman-owned, queer- and POC-driven engineering firm to develop an electronic badge with a gaming element for this year’s…
Deep dive into Citus columnar storage for Postgres. Includes a quickstart, as well as performance measurements for data loading, compression ratios, and query response times. Also covers how columnar relates to Citus, integration with Postgres range partitioning, limitations, & ways to get started.
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
Posted by Mike Schuster (Google Brain Team), Melvin Johnson (Google Translate) and Nikhil Thorat (Google Brain Team)In the last 10 years, Google Tr...
turtle 1.0 announcement post
When I started the precursor to the curl project, httpget, back in 1996, I wrote my first URL parser. Back then, the universal address was still called URL: Uniform Resource Locators. That spec was published by the IETF in 1994. The term "URL" was then used as source for inspiration when naming the tool and … Continue…
Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted…
This morning at 09:47 UTC CloudFlare effectively dropped off the Internet. The outage affected all of CloudFlare's services including DNS and any services that rely on our web proxy.
JavaScript in the browser runs many times faster than it did two decades ago. And that happened because the browser vendors spent that time working on intensive performance optimizations.
git-flow is a library of git subcommands that helps automate your branching and release workflow workflow, using Vincent Driessen's successful branching model.
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
The practice of HTTPS interception continues to be commonplace on the Internet. This blog post discusses types of monster-in-the-middle devices and software, and how to detect them.
Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.
It's not a question of if someone copies your business idea, it's when.
Dear Matt,We were all very surprised by your post, as you have so many claims against us.Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting.First, you say we have been taking from the open source community without giving back, well, of course, that isn’t true. Here is a list of 224 projects on our public GitHub page, and…
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
