Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth
(*) Benchmark is/was an investor in companies labeled with the asterisk. In 1776, Adam Smith released his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , in which he outlined his fundamental economic theories. Front and center in the book — in fact in Book 1, Chapter 1 — is his…
No, that dot in the domain name of the URL is not a mistake (2004)
You've come to this page because you've asked a question similar to the following:
Relentlessly Simplify
Notes on simplifying daily life by stripping unnecessary apps, disabling notifications, and trimming subscriptions to reduce decision fatigue.
YouTube should give users a way of knowing if a video has been altered
It was the day of the Samsung Fold launch, and I had watched a few videos from big-name tech channels on YouTube to quickly get up to speed.
Open Source Hardware Hearing Aid Part 1
My mother got hearing aids a few years ago. About a month later, she lost one. Insurance said if she wanted a replacement, she could pay them many thousands of dollars or she could wait a year.
Happy Birthday, XMPP: 20th Anniversary of Jabber
Explore and join the Movim network
Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-Pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs
I’m pleased to report that Hyperscan, the regular expression matcher that ate my life from 2008 through 2018, finally has a paper (pdf) – it’s being presented this week at NSDI &#…
Why EdDSA held up better than ECDSA against Minerva
"Minerva attack can recover private keys from smart cards, cryptographic libraries" , says the ZDNet headline. "The Czech team found a problem in the ECDSA and EdDSA algorithms used by the Atmel Toolbox crypto library to sign cryptographic operations on Athena IDProtect cards."
Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
Writing Hello World in Web Assembly (2017)
Web Assembly is written in an s-expression syntax (wast) and then needs to be translated down to binary encoded wasm. Below is a gist of wast that imports the stdlib.print function taking a memory location offset and a length, as well as importing a block of memory from the controlling runtime. We then store the…
A Gentle Introduction to Multithreading
Approaching the world of concurrency, one step at a time.
Using TLA+ to Understand Xen Vchan
The vchan protocol is used to stream data between virtual machines on a Xen host without needing any locks. It is largely undocumented. The TLA …
Bootstrapping Understanding: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering an unfamiliar data file could be described as the bootstrapping of understanding. In many ways the process resembles the scientific method, only applied to human-made, abstract objects instead of the natural world. You begin by gathering data, and then you use that information to put forth one or…
Introduction to Bert
Unless you have been out of touch with the Deep Learning world, chances are that you have heard about BERT — it has been the talk of the town for the last one year. At the end of 2018 researchers …
I do not use a debugger (2016)
I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do what I expect. I would struggle for a time, but I'd eventually give up and just accept that whatever "bugs" I had created were there to stay. … Continue reading I…
When FP? And When OOP? (2013)
Very roughly speaking, functional programming (“FP”) and object-oriented programming (“OOP”) have similar levels of expressive power and similar abilities to encapsulate programs into smaller parts that can be combined and recombined.
A Tiling Desktop Environment
I've been thinking about graphical shells recently. One of the great things about open source desktops is there is a plethora of choice when it comes to graphical shells. However they seem to fall into two camps: Full featured desktop environments that stick to the conventional stacking window metaphor. Narrowly…
The Life of a Cherry Drying Pilot (2009)
What it’s really like.
Progressive React
Building progressive and performant sites with React
The Configuration Complexity Curse
Why managing configuration has become so complex and how data configuration languages like CUE offer a path forward.
Databases always have a schema (2018)
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…
Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
Photos of the Los Angeles River
What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
Warrantless encryption is a first amendment issue
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it