The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak. But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad categories, each with somewhat different…
I work at a very ‘locked-down’ enterprise, where direct access to Docker is effectively verboten.
I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…
‘Puisque ces mystères me dépassent, feignons d’en être l’organisateur.’ –Jean Cocteau. Click to read Quariety, by anas sabbar, a Substack publication. Launched 6 years ago.
The familiar quadratic formula can give the wrong answer in a program due to numerical precision issues. This post shows what can go wrong and how to fix it. Especially important in low-precision arithmetic.
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
Yesterday I happened upon a Wired piece by Steven Levy that covers Ray Ozzie’s proposal for “CLEAR”. I’m quoted at the end of the piece (saying nothing much), so I knew the piece was coming. …
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
Avoid accepting fraudulent credit card orders by paying attention to these warning signs.
Flattening a single very hot vertical Redis node into a horizontal Redis Cluster at Stripe.
In the previous post we discussed homomorphic encryption in it’s most abstract terms we presented Paillier as a partially homomorphic encryption . Thank you @mortendahlcs for making a clarification about the terms described :
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
For those that read my blog often you may have seen me talk about EV certificates before. From a technical perspective there are many things that I don't agree with about EV certificates and from a non-technical perspective there are many things I don't like about the
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
The Beav in all his geometric glory. Even though I have been using some Linux distribution or another pretty much daily for roughly two decades, I...
How T2 burstable instances and CPU credits really work, with a worked example of a busy t2.micro running out of credits and grinding to a halt.
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
MySQL is the last major SQL database that has evolved beyond SQL-92 by introducing window functions (OVER) and common table expressions (WITH [RECURSIVE])
July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional…
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
Some clarification on what's going on with Redux
Over the years, I have implemented some changes to this blog to make it more privacy-friendly.
