Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,212 posts.
Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
Extracting Objects Recursively with Jq
The Algolia-powered Hacker News API returns nested comment threads that look like this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108
You Are Not Late
[Translations: Italian, Japanese, Chinese] Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was … Continue reading →
Using Erlang hot code updates
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.
Call me maybe: Cassandra
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
Thinking Psycopg3
Sponsoring this project will help achieve swift completion and ensure the maintenance of psycopg2, psycopg3 and other related projects.
Analyzing the codebase of Caffeine, a high performance caching library
The other day, while wasting time reading reddit, I stumbled upon a blogpost mentioning S3 FIFO, a method claiming to outperform LRU (Least Recently Used) in terms of cache miss ratio. Notable companies like RedPandas, Rising Wave, and Cloudflare have already implemented it in various capacities, so this piqued my…
eBPF Is Awesome
A blog about programming, technology and open-source stuff.
L-systems
Jordan Santell, focusing on open web engineering, immersive web, WebXR, WebGL, JavaScript, open source, open standards, and all things weird web.
Tony Hoare has died
Limousin, Saint-Yrieix-la-perche, Périgord, Université, société, Livres, citations, Nantes, Jumilhac
Obscure audio codec is a perfect fit for the N64
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
Wiretapping Google smart speakers
I was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a "backdoor" account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the Internet, access its microphone…
Bpftrace for Linux 2018
bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018: the bpftrace front-end
How LLVM Optimizes a Function
This is very nice summary of IR Passes. I found “InstCombine” pass to be easier to start with to understand the code flow in LLVM IR Pass. Maybe the beginners can start with that first.
The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value
Apple is not defending browser engine choice
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only…
As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)
Companies are willing to lay off employees despite being profitable.
ProPublica's tax story
What happens when journalists don't have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?
What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.
Microservices are hard
Over the past years I attended hundreds of interviews. Many candidates proudly told tales on how they develop their projects with a microservice architecture. Often (I don’t want to say “always”, but from my memory I think it actually is “always”) it does not require many questions to see that they used a rocket…
Kill sticky headers (2013)
There is currently a trend for using sticky headers on websites. There's even a sticky header web startup .
Let employees sell their equity
Sometimes people choose to work for one company over another for reasons related to the work environment, for example what the company does, and whether the other employees create a place that's pleasant to work at. But a major factor is compensation. If Company A and Company B are largely comparable, but Company A…
State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
Software Engineer