20131
Jerks on the Internet: what my first DDoS taught me
Ambitious software engineer
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.
20132
Teaching Linear Algebra
In a recent Hacker News post I made reference to an interesting teaching experience I had in the mid-90s. This is a longer explanation of ...
20133
Kerbal Space Oddities
This was my first successful craft, which lifted off, flew a short distance from the pad, then (after several botched attempts and the deaths of several Kerbal pilots) touched down.
20134
20135
Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , tech , coding , damn-cool-algorithms
20136
20137
Windows 3.1 All Over Again
Reactive programming and thread sharing. Javascript, Node.js, Go, Rails, Elixir and Erlang. Rewind the clocks to Windows 3.1 In 1992 with Windows 3.1 we had this thing non-preemptive multitasking, i.e. “Cooperative Multitasking”. Cooperation is a funny term, it should actually be “Programmer Controlled Multitasking”…
20138
The Berkeley Software Distribution
UNIX is always litigious
20139
How to Get a North Korea / Antarctica VPS
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20140
NTP Pool Bad Actors: The Rising Sophistication of Network Scanning
Gone are the days when computers didn't need firewalls. We are now living in an internet security arms race and your personal information ...
20141
20142
20143
20144
Think in math, write in code (2019)
Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…
20145
How I block all 26M of your curl requests
A journey in packet filtering
20146
20147
Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
How electricity, light, and radio move data across independently operated networks.
20148
Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with one weird trick
As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark …
20149
20150
20151
Hands-on with the PocketBeagle: a $25 Linux computer with lots of I/O pins
The PocketBeagle is a tiny but powerful inexpensive key-fob-sized open source Linux computer. It has 44 digital I/O pins, 8 analog input...
20152
A PM's Guide to AI Agent Architecture
A complete guide to agent architecture, orchestration patterns, trust strategies, and adoption plans for PMs building AI agents.
20153
You’re Just the Founder
At times VC’s forget who their business is built on. Nice Car Last week in a car showroom of all places I ran into a VC who I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had sat on the board of my last company an…
20154
A Mini Monitor for a Pi
This post outlines how I used a small 2 inch display as a monitor for my pi. Where it can display tty terminals and X desktops and applications as if it was a normal screen connected over hdmi. My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This…
20155
Hard work vs. Long work (2011)
Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does. Hard work is what the insightful litigator does when she synthesizes four disparate ideas and comes up with an argument …
20156
Hash: A free, online platform for modeling
Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them.
20157
PayPal’s Objectionable Terms Are Back, $2500 Fines for Content They Don’t Like
Two weeks ago Paypal introduced language into its terms and conditions that allowed them to withdraw $2500 from your account for each time they believed you "promot[ed] misinformation" or you sent, posted or published "messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene…
20158
Freeing my tablet: Android hacking, software and hardware
Freeing my tablet (Android hacking, SW and HW)
20159
Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title
As I've spoken and written about all modern terminals are actually "emulating" something dating from the 1970s.
20160
I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…