Assorted Links

YArchive, an archive of notable messages from notable people about computing. Via HN.

“Why you should understand (a little) about TCP” tells a story about how leaky abstractions are leaky, and how you too can become a wizard. Via HN.

Going further, in line of sight: Nagle’s Algorithm - tinygram prevention.

It is now common knowledge, that only terrorists and criminals are using cryptography. Even if some newspapers are too embarassed to have said such a thing, others won’t. The pressure is building up, and it’s not wise to believe that technology and open source will protect society. Via HN.

Much more fun: Building an operating system, from the ground up, for memory safety and asynchronizity. The all-managed asynchronous-everything-thing has some interesting consequences. Via reddit/rust. See also HN.

Slightly related: “What color is your function?”. But consider some HN comments for a more well-rounded perspective. The world continuously refuses being simple enough for me.

Not simple, but easy: Developing a hatred against passwords. Strange policies and bad UI have been found insufficient for actually improving security. There are better options, though. The OP mentioned clef. Looks nice. After having had to implement only parts of a somewhat acceptable authentication system, outsourcing as much as possible sounds like a great idea to me. Via HN.

Venture capital is all about money, risk, and status, and therefor the domain of men. Think again. A look behind the angel investors at YCombinator, and how Jessica Livingston made herself irreplacable. See also HN.

Unsecuring the world: ZigBee’s home automation redefines using open crypto standards.. Gross incompetence is as good a guess as malicious intent. This problem killed off some christmas present ideas. It seems, in 2015, if you want home automation, you’re still better off building it yourself.

On to happier thoughts: Towards the work of actually trustworthy computing (or flying pigs), work on verified LLVM is progressing. Via HN.

Debugging stories are always more fun than the experience leading to them. To make the latter part easier, read more of them, for instance “The story of a latency spike”. Via HN.

Remember history: Building PCs for fun. AnandTech seems to start a review series on fans, and introduces Fan reviews by explaining some engineering background as well. If you, like me, never cared to explore the trade-off between many and few blades, this is an easy start – with real numbers from buyable parts.

Closing this already much too long list with forbidden fruits: Rust, the best language of the world (it must be, I haven’t written a single program in it yet!) is coming of age; since the stabilization of the core language, work on libraries has begun. Parser/Parser combinators like nom 1.0 and chomp 0.1 (via reddit) are awaiting your commands, and somebody is cheating on Active Record, leaving ruby for rust with Diesel (via reddit), which looks like the interface to SQL you always wanted but where afraid to ask for. The combinaton of rust libraries supporting zero-overhead C calling convention, zero-cost abstraction, and a very high-level type system featuring not only safety but strong compile-time guarantees could easily be called the killer argument for it as a library language.

Alas, that point will never come. Still, a human may dream.

However, rust still needs more libraries before aquiring sentience and the will for world domination: try helping with a TOML parser based on nom. Mentoring included.