Top all-time · #10315
David Galbraith
Personal blog · davidvgalbraith.comprogrammingsystems
David Galbraith writes davidvgalbraith, a personal blog at davidvgalbraith.com about programming and systems. Since 2016, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “How I fixed a bug in Atom”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its posts on regular expressions and performance, especially how the author fixed a pathological regex bug in Atom. Commenters cite it as background on slowdowns and DoS risk.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Tales from the software development trenches
Most-linked posts?
- How I fixed a bug in Atom5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-29
What Hacker News says?
There is a type of regex called a "pathological" regex which can be used to make certain regex implementations have exponential time complexity. If you exposed this in your application, someone could DoS you. Some libraries might have accidentally pathological regular expressions, and so some user input might be able to trigger the pathological case (Atom had a bug a few years ago where certain source files would ca…
Comment linking /how-i-fixed-atom/
on “The most popular docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities”Submitted How I fixed a bug in Atom as a story · 551 points
HN discussionhttp://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/ http://stackstatus.net/post/147710624694/outage-postmortem-j... https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html The difference isn't academical. It has huge practical implications, from software that is just annoyingly slow to DoS attacks. People need to understand that. And stop using non-regular regexes (or better yet: regex in general) in production code. It increases world…
Comment linking /how-i-fixed-atom/
on “Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime”Submitted How I fixed libuv as a story · 18 points
HN discussionCheck this out: http://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/
Comment linking /how-i-fixed-atom/
on “Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API”Submitted How I fixed Node.js as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSimilar: "How I fixed a bug in Atom". http://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993470
Comment linking /how-i-fixed-atom/
on “Diving into Other People's Code”