Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 822 posts.
There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
What is the function of a fire alarm?
SaaS Pricing (2013)
SaaS pricing is a mystery to many developers. Here is how to do it better.
Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production
As some of you may know, there's a wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office that we use for cryptography. In this post, we’re going to explore how that works.
Jepsen: CockroachDB beta-20160829
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database, loosely patterned after Google Spanner and designed for semi-synchronous networks. It speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol , supports a reasonable dialect of SQL , and combines replication for durability with transparent scale-out sharding for large tables. Its most…
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Eastern District of Virginia
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...
Vitamin D toxicity: What if you get too much?
Understand the risks of taking high doses of this vitamin in supplement form.
The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery
Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join. The trouble is that whi...
Keybase launches encrypted Git
You're reading the Keybase blog. There are more posts . When you're done, you can install Keybase .
Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem
When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but…
Debugging an evil Go runtime bug
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
The internals of PostgreSQL
After a temporary stay in Japan to focus on my health and personal responsibilities, I am fully recovered, ready, and excited to work abroad again.
Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the die rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.
MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3
In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA
Last month, Ethan Heilman, Tadge Dryja, Madars Virza, and I took a look at IOTA, currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency with a $1.9B…
Notes on Programming in C – Rob Pike (1989)
What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules. I don't expect you to agree with all of them, because they are opinion and opinions change with the times. But they've been accumulating in my head, if not on paper until now, for a…
Attacking Machine Learning with Adversarial Examples
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
React, Facebook, and the Revocable Patent License. Why It’s a Paper 🐯.
Update(9/25/17): My article about the licensing change.
Worldwide, Median Household Income About $10,000
New Gallup global income data estimate the median household income across 131 countries at $9,733, and median per-capita income at $2,920. Incomes in the 10 wealthiest countries are more than 50 times those in the 10 poorest.
Quote Origin: Computer Memory: 640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone
Bill Gates? James E. Fawcette? Nancy Andrews? Jerry Pournelle? InfoWorld? Apocryphal?
Mac external displays for designers and developers
If you’re considering an external display for your Mac, there’s a few important decisions to make. Apple doesn’t sell external displays any more, so you can’t just default to their wisdom. That’s an issue, because not all displays are well suited for Macs.
How To Legally Own Another Person
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
EFF's New Wordlists for Random Passphrases
Joe Bonneau dives deep into systems using dice to generate random passphrases and introduces EFF's three new wordlists.
So You Want Continuous Time Zones
At present the world is partitioned into a finite number of large, discrete time zones. A time zone is an area on Earth where all of the clocks are set to the same time. An example of a time zone is America/Santiago, an area which covers continental Chile. All the clocks in this ...
Announcing the first SHA-1 collision
Posted by Marc Stevens (CWI Amsterdam), Elie Bursztein (Google), Pierre Karpman (CWI Amsterdam), Ange Albertini (Google), Yarik Markov (Goog...
24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .