Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,897 posts.

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8462

Render Multimedia in Pure C

In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…

8472

Google Wave's Scrollbars

In spite of some of the reaction to it , I find Google Wave to be surprisingly useful. One thing I don't really understand, though, is its scrollbars. They behave quite differently from regular scrollbars, and I can't discern any overwhelming advantages of Google's implementation. It seems I'm not alone. The…

8473

How to Write with Style (1985)

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and…

8476

Fast high-level programming languages

Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…

8477

Raspberry Pi 400 teardown and review

Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…

8481

A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)

So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…

8483

Insecurities in the Linux /dev/random

New paper: “Security Analysis of Pseudo-Random Number Generators with Input: /dev/random is not Robust, by Yevgeniy Dodis, David Pointcheval, Sylvain Ruhault, Damien Vergnaud, and Daniel Wichs. Abstract: A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is…

8484

Swift UTF-8 String

Swift 5 switches the preferred encoding of strings from UTF-16 to UTF-8 while preserving efficient Objective-C-interoperability. Because the String type abstracts away these low-level concerns, no source-code changes from developers should be necessary*, but it’s worth highlighting some of the benefits this move gives…