Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.
CSRF protection without tokens or hidden form fields
A couple of months ago, I received a request from a random Internet user to add CSRF protection to my little web framework Microdot, and I thought it was a fantastic idea.When I set off to do this…
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…
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:
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…
Action Plan for a New CTO
This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …
Using sqlite3 as a notekeeping document graph
document organizer with tags and full-text-search, in a simple and clean sqlite3 schema
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…
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
This is a translation/guest post by Riku Merikoski. The original can be found here (in Finnish). All mistakes due to translation are my fault. On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical hap…
Debit cards are hidden financial infrastructure
Debit cards are a core piece of financial infrastructure and drive much of the innovation happening in fintech.
About This Googler's Manifesto
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are…
When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership
In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by …
PHP in 2022
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
Docker's Second Death
I do enterprise cloud stuff at Google, also at k8sfiles.com. Words are my own.
Zero rupee note (2015)
A Non-Violent Weapon of Non-Cooperation Against Corruption Have you heard of the ZERO-RUPEE NOTE, yet? Many of you may wonder what the use of it is. Well, All Indians face Corruption in almost all…
Why isn't there a replication crisis in math?
The replication crisis is a major problem in medicine and social science; we know that a huge fraction of the published literature is outright wrong. But in math we don't seem to have a similar crisis, despite reasonably frequent minor errors in published papers. Why not, and what can this tell us about the fields…
State of the Sanderson 2022
State of the Sanderson 2022 Introduction Wow. What a year. I can remember writing this essay last year, and being all giddy about the fact that I was hiding four secret novels from you all. I said, “Maybe next year, I’ll be able to explain to you all why my year was so strange.” One big part of it was those novels. The
Credit card fraud warning signs
Avoid accepting fraudulent credit card orders by paying attention to these warning signs.
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 […]
3 lines of code shouldn't take all day
Reflections on my time at Electronic Arts and techniques used to improve iteration times in video game development
Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use
This blog post reveals how you can salvage lithium cells from the many discarded, disposable vape devices that get littered in our towns and cities. With a pair of pliers and some bravery, I manage...
How to implement a hash table in C
An explanation of how to implement a simple hash table data structure, with code and examples in the C programming language.
.localhost Domains
I’ve found a way to configure private, custom domains for web-apps I have running on my computer. So instead of having to remember and type “localhost:4333”, I can simply navigate to “appname.localhost”. I love it!