Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 716 posts.
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
In Praise of APL: A Language for Lyrical Programming Professor Alan J. Perlis Yale University
Tell me if this sounds familiar: any connection from inside the corporate network is trusted and any connection from the outside is not. This is the security strategy used by most enterprises today. The problem is that security is breached, the attacker has access to everything.
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…
Extend the switch statement so that it can be used as either a statement or an expression, and that both forms can use either a "traditional" or "simplified" scoping and control flow behavior. These changes will simplify everyday coding, and also prepare the way for the use of pattern matching (JEP 305) in switch …
Some integrated circuits have very interesting dies under a microscope, like the chip below with designs that look kind of like butterflies....
Scheduling In Go : Part II - Go Scheduler. This blogpost is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the mechanics and semantics of the Go …
I recently discovered the awesome Wireguard VPN tunnel and I was sold. Wireguard is a simple, kernel-based, state-of-the-art VPN that also happens to be ridiculously fast and uses modern cryptographic principles that all other highspeed VPN solutions lack.
January 31, 2025: Post updated to clarify the reduced on-demand pricing and workloads recommendations. Just a few years ago, creating a database that could support your business at any scale while providing consistent low latency was a daunting task. That changed for me in 2012 while reading Werner Vogels’ blog post…
CockroachDB 2.1 is 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora at less than 2% of the price per tpmC. Read on to see performance benchmarks of CockroachDB 2.1, including the latest TPC-C results.
A week ago we published a story about new amplification attacks using memcached protocol on UDP port 11211. A few things happened since then: Github announced it was a target of 1.3Tbps memcached attack. OVH and Arbor reported similar large attacks with the peak reported at 1.7Tbps.
Yesterday I happened upon a Wired piece by Steven Levy that covers Ray Ozzie’s proposal for “CLEAR”. I’m quoted at the end of the piece (saying nothing much), so I knew the piece was coming. …
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
What's the best GPU for Deep Learning? The 2080 Ti. We benchmark the 2080 Ti vs the Titan V, V100, and 1080 Ti.
While in the middle of writing “Reading bits in far too many ways, part 3”, I realized that I had written a lot of background material that had absolutely nothing to do with bit I/O and…
This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.
The main feature is fast access to a flat, 24-bit address space. Although there are many ways to retrofit a 'C02 with expanded memory, AFAIK none can touch this implementation for speed. Given any random address in the 16 megabyte space, KK can fetch that byte in 6-8 cyles. It's fast because:
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
