1981
Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
1982
Fast Shadow Stacks for Go
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
1983
Donating forks to the dining hall
A year and a half ago, the dining hall would run out of forks every evening. My roommates and I would inevitably have to eat with spoons.
1984
1985
Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
1986
1987
API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Instead of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS, make the failure visible. Unfortunately, many well-known API providers don't currently do so.
1988
20 Years of Blogging on my own website
I missed it, but last month I had my 20-year blogging anniversary. Let's recap a bit about how it started and how it went.
1989
1990
Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
1991
Runtime code generation and execution in Go
Disclaimer: I won’t expand on why/when you want to do this kind of hack, and you should not do this unless you know exactly what you are doing. Everything I talk about here is completely unsafe and might not be accurate for the future Go versions. This is not a recommendation, but more of a fun story.
1992
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
1993
WP21
It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’…
1994
Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One compan...
1995
Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. JWT stands for JSON Web Tokens, a reasonably well defined standard for authenticated tokens. Specifically they have a header with format information, a payload, and a signature or message authentication code. The core idea is that whoever has the corresponding verification…
1996
Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization [1] . Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean…
1997
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
1998
My new PSU burns out – I fix it, and torture it by cracking water
My brand new PSU, themost complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, startedlife in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I gott...
1999
2000
Evolution of the ELF object file format
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…
2001
The one-year anniversary of my total glossectomy
One year ago today, I went into surgery expecting that I’d lose half my tongue to a squamous cell carcinoma recurrence. The evening before, Bess and I got legally married;[1] it was a short, but ch…
2002
macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
2003
Old dogs, new CSS tricks
A lot of new CSS features have shipped in the last years, but actual usage is still low. One of the biggest barriers: we need to re-wire our own brains.
2004
Long distance sound localization with the Raspberry Pi
TDOA Sound Localization is determining the source of a sound when all you know is the differences in the time of arrival of the sound event…
2005
Mediocre Engineer's Guide to HTTPS
As a mediocre engineer, I took Internet and HTTPS communication for granted and never dove any deeper. Today we’re improving as engineers and learning a rough overview of how internet communication works, specifically focusing on HTTP and TLS.
2006
Feynman's Garden
The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…
2007
2008
Low-latency scripting for game engines
The basics condensed into one very large document
2009
How Home Assistant is being used to protect from missile and drone attacks
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant
2010
The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success
Reflections on a Wall Street legend.