Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
Growing fibers
wingolog: article: growing fibers
Changes I would make to Go
To highlight exactly how I think Go could be better, I want to make comparisons to Rust.
Stripe and Coinbase apparently can't find my Bitcoin
Update2: Stripe sent an update and it sounds like Coinbase will credit the BTC to my Coinbase account soon:
Where the Apple accounts that hackers are threatening to wipe came from
The tech news recently has seen quite a lot of chatter about an alleged haul of Apple credentials [http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-icloud-ransom-what-you-need-to-know/], apparently about 250 million of them in all. Allegedly. Maybe. Or was it 300 million? [https://www.macrumors.com/
Chrome OS native development
Native development on a Chromebook, with Chrome OS in Developer Mode
Unbalanced reads from SSDs in software RAID mirrors in Linux
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…
Rust Memory Management
In the light of my latest fascination with Rust programming language, I've started to make small presentation about Rust at my office , sinc...
Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
Latency matters
A month ago, danluu wrote about [terminal and shell performance](https://danluu.com/term-latency/). In that post, he measured the latency between a key being pressed and the corresponding character appearing in the terminal. Across terminals, median latencies ranged between 5 and 45 milliseconds, with the 99.9th…
Thoughts on the Systemd Root Exploit
Sebastian Krahmer of the SUSE Security Team has discovered a local root exploit in systemd v228 . A local user on a system running systemd v228 can escalate to root privileges. That's bad.
Postgres Job Queues and Failure by MVCC
How Postgres’ concurrency model coupled with long-lived transactions can degrade the performance of indexes on hot tables in your database.
USPS ‘Informed Delivery’ Is Stalker’s Dream
A free new service from the U.S. Postal Service that provides scanned images of incoming mail before it is slated to arrive at its destination address is raising eyebrows among security experts who worry about the service’s potential for misuse by private investigators, identity thieves, stalkers or abusive…
One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xerox Alto
I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...
Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtual Machine
Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communication among threads) which is being…
The Ferocious Complexity of the Cell
Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern…
Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64
Manipulate Functions with the J Language
The Pragmatic Programmer recommends that we learn at least one new language every year. To be effective, the languages we learn should differ sufficiently from those we already master and ideally introduce us to a new paradigm too. Learning a different programming language affects the way we view code. A new paradigm…
Lock-Free Bugs
[ I wrote this post in mid-2014 for debuggers.co, which seems to have gone at least partly defunct, so I am reproducing it here. That site collected answers from programmers to the prompt “What’s the most interesting bug you’ve encountered?” ]
How Powerful Are Microsoft Azure’s Free Jupyter Notebooks?
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
The .NET IL Interpreter
Whilst writing a previous blog post I stumbled across the .NET Interpreter, tucked away in the source code. Although, it I’d made even the smallest amount of effort to look for it, I’d have easily found it via the GitHub ‘magic’ file search: