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A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 112 posts.
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway
Not every code injection bug is a security hole.
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An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector
The computer itself ceases to exist.
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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)
In this regularly but rarely updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and shortcomings (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should…
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Announcing WSL 2
WSL 2 is a new architecture that allows for dramatic file system performance and full system call compatibility in WSL using a Linux kernel.
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The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
Last November I went to an IETF meeting for the first time. The IETF is an interesting place; it seems to be about 1/3 maintenance grunt wo...
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A deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild
Posted by Ian Beer, Project ZeroProject Zero’s mission is to make 0-day hard. We often work...
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The largest Git repo on the planet
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
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Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019
Almost nine years ago, Cloudflare was a tiny company and I was a customer not an employee. Cloudflare had launched a month earlier and one day alerting told me that my little site, jgc.org, didn’t seem to have working DNS any more.
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Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web
WebAssembly is an assembly language for a conceptual machine, not a physical one. This is why it can be run across a variety of different machine architectures. WebAssembly needs a ...
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Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation
In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the …
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Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology
I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because their production depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).
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Files Are Fraught with Peril
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
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Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?
In the original release of Windows 95, you could change your time zone by clicking on the map, and the time zone you selected would highlight. Similarly,
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
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A fast alternative to the modulo reduction (2016)
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform such numbers into indexes no larger than N? Suppose you have a hash table with a capacity N. Again, you need to transform your hash values (typically 32-bit ……
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Race Condition vs. Data Race (2011)
It’s terribly punny/dorky of me, but reading your post it just occurred to me one could start a blog called “Race Condition” about being a person of color and being a computer scientist.
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“What the Hardware Does” Is Not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
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What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?
It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.
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The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
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Fast Software, the Best Software
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
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Remote code execution vulnerability in apt/apt-get
tl;dr I found a vulnerability in apt that allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine i...
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The Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure, composable future for WebAssembly
Lin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. ...
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JIT-Less V8
V8 v7.4 supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime.
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Why Do Buses Bunch?
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .
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The sad state of font rendering on Linux
As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic. If you don’t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost. Thanks.