Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,213 posts.
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
Early stage technology decisions must be, uncomfortably, a means to an end.
By Michael Nielsen, January 2019
What do Photoshop, Matlab, Panic Transmit, and Eclipse have in common? They are among the 299 apps for which macOS applies compatibillity fixes.
John Gruber was right, when pointing to Dan Frakes’ review of the Mail app in Mountain Lion, to highlight the fact that the application drops support for RSS (he calls it an “interesting omission”, which is both correct and understated). It is indeed the most interesting aspect of the review, even though it’s buried…
I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, a common form of insomnia. Sound familiar anyone?
Some (well-known) consequences of AI automating work
Base64 is an elegant way to convert binary data to text, making it easy to store and transport. This article covers the basics of Base64 encoding, including what it is, how it works and why it's important. It also shows how to encode and decode Base64 data in various programming languages.
Expressive code in C++
How dare you!
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
However recently it added a killer feature: generated columns . (This was added in 3.31.0, released 2020-01-22.)
Let’s encrypt: an automated certificate authority to encrypt the entire web, Aas et al., CCS’19 This paper tells the story of Let’s Encrypt, from it’s early beginnings in 20…
I knew that data tables had been around a long time, but I didn't appreciate how long until I read recently about account-keeping in ancient Mesopotamia.
HTML and CSS
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you.
A review for readers unfamiliar with this feature: Amazon IAM ( Identity and Access Management ) is a service which allows for the creation of access credentials which are limited in scope; for example, you can have keys which can read objects from Amazon S3 but cannot write any objects. IAM Roles for EC2 are a…
This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts...
This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.
Web typography for web designers and web developers.
