Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 1,895 posts.

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1506

Nibble Sort

A while back, John Regehr posted the Nibble Sort Programming Contest on his blog. The objective was to write a program that sorts the 4-bit components (nibbles) of 64-bit words as fast as possible. For example, 0x42badc0ffeed00d5 should result in 0xffeedddcba542000 after sorting.

1509

Who Says C is Simple? (2010)

When I (George) started to write CIL I thought it was going to take two weeks. Exactly a year has passed since then and I am still fixing bugs in it. This gross underestimate was due to the fact that I thought parsing and making sense of C is simple. You probably think the same. What I did not expect was how many dark…

1510

Tarsnap exploit bounty

Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…

1518

Why I no longer use MVC frameworks

神の領域10作品まとめページに戻るはじめに総合まとめと称して、100作品とか50作品とかのまとめ記事を書いているが、作品が多すぎて選びきれない!候補10本くらいに絞ってくれ!という要望からこの記事を作成している人間は選択肢が多すぎると逆に選...

1528

Goodbye, OpenStack

I just removed myself from every OpenStack mailing list and meetup. I’m sure I’ll still use it, but I don’t see myself as part of that community any longer. When I was at DreamHost, I really felt like part of that community and that I could help make it better. However, in the three years since I’ve left DreamHost, I…