13411
Why we have to boycott RSA
The only thing stopping corporations from putting NSA backdoors into their products is the risk of getting caught. RSA got caught backdoorin...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.
13412
A home made PCB stepper motor
The first idea is interesting because it means cheap, precision-manufactured PCBs can be easily transformed into cheap, precise tiny motors.
13413
The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
13414
Fast B-Trees
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
13415
Command and Conquer – Programming an RTS game in HTML5 and Javascript
I’m a programmer and author interested in how intelligence, perception and learning work—and in building things that explore those questions directly.
13416
Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 1
I was recently made maintainer of the json gem, and aside from fixing some old bugs, I focused quite a bit on its performance, so that it is now the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby on most benchmarks.
13417
Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
13418
HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
13419
Sana'a
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
13420
13421
Lisp Badge LE
This is a self-contained low-power computer with its own display and keyboard that you can program in uLisp, a version of the high-level language Lisp for microcontrollers:
13422
CPU Backdoors
It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…
13423
John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018)
ps aux | more
13424
Elite for Emacs (2015)
A recent discovery from old backups revealed something long forgotten: I really developed a version of Elite for…. that’s right… Emacs text editor.
13425
13426
Testing Distributed Systems
Curated list of resources on testing distributed systems
13427
Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
13428
13429
13430
On Craft
My grandpa -- my Missouri grandpa, who played slide guitar to me when I got homesick on the rare occasions I stayed with them -- grew up on a farm without electricity. He went past eighth grade, which really mattered to him. He loved that I played harp, which he always called "elegant," in an extremely Missouri…
13431
13432
Log Structured Merge Trees
A detailed look at the interesting LSM file organisation seen in BigTable, Cassandra and most recently MongoDB.
13433
13434
It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
13435
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the…
13436
In praise of blowing up your life
a reminder for the relatively sane
13437
13438
AI Art Panic
If you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve seen AI generated art and discussion of the impact of the tools. You’ve also probably seen a lot of hate for AI generated art. There’s a lot of drama going on, as art focused communities across the internet decide how to handle this. Does AI generated/assisted art…
13439
The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting
Before Reddit added native image hosting, Imgur accounted for 15% of all submissions to Reddit. Now it’s below 9%.
13440