The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
We’ve read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if there
OneLogin , an online service that lets users manage logins to sites and apps from a single platform, says it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data.
Dave Winer won’t link to Facebook posts from his blog. I don’t either.
If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. André Breton, Mad Love
Looking back at my year of Rust. Part reflection, part waymark.
It is a wonderful accident of history that the internet and web were created as open platforms that anyone — users, developers…
In this post I will talk about some tools that can help us solve a painful problem in Python, especially when using PyPy: memory consumption. Why are we concerned with this in the first place? Why …
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Another reason for optimizing compilers: It allows us to write simple and obvious code expecting that the compiler will do the optimization. This both reduces the initial defect count and makes the code more maintainable in the long-run. Note that these are also often the simplest optimizations (e.g. a calculation…
In 2005 and 2006, a series of significant results were published against SHA-1 [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]. These repeated break-throughs caused something of a crisis of faith as cryptographers questioned whether we knew how to build hash functions at all. After all, many hash functions from the 1990's had not aged well [ 1 ][ 2…
I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you through my latest talk from start to finish.
Update: it's been a month since my proposal was approved - details at the end. Before my month long vacation I was in a crisis. Now I'm back at work and regardless of the great team and awesome project - I'm feeling the crisis creeping back. It's not the job,
This post covers essentially the same material as a 5-minute presentation I gave at RC .
Typically, if you're designing a storage system - such as a filesystem, or a database - one of your major concerns is how to store the data on disk. You have to take care of allocating space for the objects to be stored, as well as storing the indexing data; you have to worry about what happens when you want to extend…
There are lots of edge cases I hadn't considered, and it's very inconsistent between browsers. Here's what I found…
For better or worse, we count lines of code. We (hopefully) feel a little dirty when we do it, because it's a flawed metric. But we do it . We do it on large codebases and small code snippets . Even badass hacker David Nolen does it .
Updated 2018-01-21: Added clarification related to assertion about lack of context free nature of the C preprocessor.
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out…
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
Mosaic: Processing a trillion-edge graph on a single machine Maass et al., EuroSys’17 Unless your graph is bigger than Facebook’s, you can process it on a single machine. With the incep…
An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems Fonseca et al., EuroSys’17 “Is your distributed system bug free?” “I formally verified it!R…
I’ve been watching the Chinese TV show 他来了，请闭眼 (Love Me If You Dare). It’s a good show, kinda reminiscent of the BBC series Sherlock, likewise a crime drama ...
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
