Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
634

Quake 3 Source Code Review

Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…

636

Why Constant-Time Crypto?

In 1996, Paul Kocher published a novel attack on RSA, specifically on RSA implementations , that extracted information on the private key by simply measuring the time taken by the private key operation on various inputs. It took a few years for people to accept the idea that such attacks were practical and could be…

644

Regular Expression Matching in the Wild

The first two articles in this series, “ Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast ” and “ Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach ,” introduced the foundation of DFA-based and NFA-based regular expression matching. Both were based on toy implementations optimized for teaching the basic…

647

Tom Duff on Duff's device (1988)

I normally do not read comp.lang.c, but Jim McKie told me that `` Duff's device '' had come up in comp.lang.c again. I have lost the version that was sent to netnews in May 1984, but I have reproduced below the note in which I originally proposed the device. (If anybody has a copy of the netnews version, I would…

648

Pattern: Back ends for front ends

With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …

651

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…

653

the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism

In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…

657

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.