Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
6786

Java Trap, 2010 Edition

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation , my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0) , BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions…

6790

2FA on the command line

OTP: One-Time Password TOTP: Time-based One-time Password algorithm 2FA: Two-factor authentication There is no shortage of OTP 2FA apps availiable for your phone, such as Google Authenticator or Duo Mobile. These apps take an initial secret code, and create a TOTP anytime you need a 2FA code for login.… …

6795

The RubyGems "Security Incident"

Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…

6796

Magic Numbers

1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?

6799

Will It Optimize? (2010)

See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…