Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 637 posts.
When we launched the iPhone version of Basecamp in February of last year, it was after many rounds of experimentation on the architectural direction. The default route suggested by most when we got started back in early/mid-2012 was simple enough: Everything Be Native! This was a sensible recomm…
A quick overview into wheel based Python deployments.
The issues of this pattern are now widely recognized, but what’s the real solution?
Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams ( linux kernel , id Software , Epic Unreal ) to single individual ( Prince of Persia , Another world , Rick Dangerous ), many have adopted it as…
Self-examination for Seed and Series A startups
Shopify powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries with essential commerce infrastructure. Our engineers and developers work on challenging and impactful projects spanning frontend, backend, mobile and data.
OK OK, I couldn't resist that title but it probably goes a bit far. Let me try for a little more nuance:
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
"Malleability" of Bitcoin transactions has recently become a major issue. This article looks at how transactions are modified, at the byte...
The web site has since been through various iterations and changes, therefore I include some screenshots below for posterity (because my design is much more beautiful than what is now online ;-).
Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R. K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Thomas Anderson, University of Washington; Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zürich
Everything at Google, from Search to Gmail, is packaged and run in a Linux container. Each week we launch more than 2 billion container inst...
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law...
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
Broccoli is an asset pipeline for building JS+CSS apps running in the browser. Read about the architecture, and how it compares to other build tools.
A Story Of realloc (And Laziness) 05 April 2014 A Simple Macro It...
Today we're announcing some improvements to News Feed to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant.
I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people. They be...
Two interesting things in formally verified software happened recently. The big one was the release of SeL4 - a formally verified L4 microkernel. The second was much smaller, but closer to my usual scope: a paper which showed the correctness of sections of a couple of the assembly implementations of Curve25519.
2013 Update: I was young and stupid when I wrote this. I fear that Haskell is doomed to succeed. — Tony Hoare I ♥ Lisp. I think it's t...
I’ve been telling this fictional story about Dentist Office Software for years to describe why we are so focused on our “networks” investment strategy. Yesterday I told it at a HackNY event we did at the USV office and my partner Albert provided a finishing touch that really drives it home. Since I’ve never told […]
[This was originally published on the now-defunct Infogami and was surprisingly hard to find online, so I put it here. I’ve added commentary, with our now internet-decades of hindsight, in brackets. I’ve also summarized the names mentioned (and alluded to) along 7 dimensions: Evocativity, Brevity, Greppability…
