Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 822 posts.
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
On Friday, MIT Technology Review published an article on the cryptocurrency IOTA. However, we at the Media Lab have issues with the story
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
As opposed to the public telephone network, the internet has a Packet Switched design. But just how big can these packets be?
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
No matter how much anyone tries to sugar coat it, a service like Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) which deals with billions of records hacked out of other peoples' systems is always going to sit in a grey area. There are degrees, of course; at one end
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
You love rebasing, right? Rewriting history might be appealing, but there are good reasons not to.
I was enjoying some pizza the other day with some buddies that know a bit about my research and understand where I am coming from with regards to my own computing aesthetics. They understand that I have always pushed for the smallest code that I can get, and to simplify
On May 1, 2017 Intel disclosed the AMT vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00075), but details of that vulnerability were not made public. However, Tenable researchers were able to overcome this challenge and make Tenable the first to deliver Intel AMT vulnerability detection capabilities to customers, just minutes after Intel’s…
Following the disclosure of the BlueBorne attack vector this past September, Armis discovered that critical Bluetooth vulnerabilities impact the Amazon Echo and Google Home.
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
The 1600 LoC patch allows userspace to pass the kernel the encryption keys for an established connection, making encryption happen transparently inside the kernel.
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
We’re outspoken about running a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. So why? People ask us why all the time. Why choose profit? So I thought I’d detail som…
Programming is all about managing complexity. Without good tools to manage it, the complexity of programs becomes mentally intractable for our limited brains and we’d lose control and understanding of our programs (imagine writing a big software system entirely in assembly language).
In many information systems, we work with arrays of integers. For example, maybe you need to keep track of which records in a database contain a given value. This sort of mapping can be expressed as an array of integers. These arrays can end up taking up a large fraction of your memory or disk … Continue reading…
The big story this year was last month's surprise acquisition of Pinboard's long-time nemesis Delicious. This illustrates the importance of always having a backup nemesis, an area where Pinboard leads the industry.
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter …
The Brave browser team concluded an ICO for their Basic Attention Token yesterday in about thirty seconds. This led to this tweet: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC’s didn’t even have time to put on a sweater vest. — briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017 Of course…
Announcing the release of HumbleNet, a project initiated at Humble Bundle in 2015 to port peer-to-peer multiplayer games, originally to asm.js and now to WebAssembly. The current open source version ...
TLA+ is a formal specification and verification language intended to help engineers specify, design and reason about complex, real-life algorithms and software or hardware systems. We explore its motivation, application and principles of design.
What we learned from the December 2017 Go User Survey.
Pay toilets are nasty, and ought to be illegal. Those of us who are not poor can afford the price, if we accept the practice; poor people can't. To deny people access to a toilet when they need one is nasty and degrading.
