Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.
There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…
Today we are launching the beta of EmDash, a full-stack serverless JavaScript CMS built on Astro 6.0. It combines the features of a traditional CMS with modern security, running plugins in sandboxed Worker isolates.
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
On March 27 The following message was posted on the official GitHub blog: We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.coms history. The attack began around 2AM UTC on Thursday, March 26, and involves a wide combination of attack vectors. These incl[...]
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of…
WEI? I’m a frayed knotTwo pieces of string walk into a bar.The first piece of string asks for a drink.The bartender says, “Get lost. We don’t serve pieces of string.”The second string ties a knot in his middle and messes up his ends. Then he orders a drink. The bartender says, “Hey, you aren’t a...
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.…
Historically, running native code on the web required a browser plugin. In 2013, we introduced the PNaCl sandbox to provide a means of bui...
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.
Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding
Leadership in the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel. The research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community…
strengthening digital self-defense | research and development | providing privacy-focused goods and services
A new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini powered by M1, the first in a family of chips designed by Apple specifically for the Mac.
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
Several users have recently reported a website pretending to offer an official macOS version of Notepad++: notepad-plus-plus-mac.org
HashiCorp adopts the Business Source License to ensure continued investment in its community and to continue providing open, freely available products.
I'll try to leave the pulp in here and keep this as chronological as I can. In that spirit, no tweets were harmed in the making of this post.
Request for materials: I would like to receive tutorial information on: Sony PS3 access protection mechanisms, the Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm ( ECDSA ), the structure of the PS3 hypervisor, METLDR, signing tools, and any other topics necessary for a person reasonably skilled in computer science to be…
UPDATE: Apple announced it will provide fully encrypted iCloud backups, meeting a longstanding demand by EFF and other privacy-focused organizations, and it has officially dropped its plans to install photo-scanning software on its devices, which would have inspected users’ private photos in iCloud...
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
