Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.

Any topic
Any year
11073

BoringSSL

We recently switched Google's two billion line repository over to BoringSSL , our fork of OpenSSL . This means that BoringSSL is now powering Chromium (on nearly all platforms), Android M and Google's production services. For the first time, the majority of Google's products are sharing a single TLS stack and making…

11074

A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder

This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. You can find the source code here along with a test suite and benchmark:

11077

Broken Links

I’ve been getting madder and madder about the increasing use of dorky web links; for example, twitter.com/timbray has become twitter.com/#!/timbray . Others have too; see Breaking the Web with hash-bangs and Going Postel . It dawns on me that a word of explanation might be in order for those who normally don’t worry…

11082

NES graphics – Part 1

Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…

11096

The string type is broken

My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of a string being a useful feature. After doing a bit more research I can determine only one thing: most current string types are broken! Many of us believe our strings […]