Top all-time · #296
mikeash.com
Personal blog · mikeash.com/pyblogprogramming
mikeash.com is a personal blog at mikeash.com about programming. Since 2008, 170 different Hacker News readers have linked it 305 times, most often “What Is the Secure Enclave?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his Objective-C and Apple platform internals posts, mainly Friday Q&A, as deep, well written explanations of how the runtime and hardware work.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Called well written, instructive, a great investigation of Objective-C and Cocoa, and a favorite technical blog
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2013-12-16
- /pyblog/7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-02-11
- What Is the Secure Enclave?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-02-19
- Dissecting objc_msgSend on ARM646 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-07-01
- Tagged Pointer Strings6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-07-31
- Objc_msgSend's New Prototype6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-11
- ARM64 and You6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-09-27
- Why Is Swift's String API So Hard?5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-11-06
- Let's Build Tagged Pointers (2012)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-07-13
- /pyblog/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-04-08
What Hacker News says?
You can read more about it in this well written article: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html
on “A Message to Our Customers”Submitted I Do Not Agree to Your Terms as a story · 396 points
HN discussionI guess what sort of domains do people like to play around with in their own time? For games there's 3d rendering, physics and AI which seem fun (at least to me) but I'm not sure how to necessarily make fun challenges out of them. For non-direct-games things fancier AI like deep learning, audio synthesis, making compilers/parsers/transpilers, math stuff like project euler, puzzle/board game solvers/bots ( https://gi…
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-build-synchronized.html
on “Announcing Starfighter”Submitted ARM64 and You as a story · 296 points
HN discussionThe compiler does some very fancy stuff with objc_msgSend to make it fast, and the selectors are interned. https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...
Comment linking /pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.html
on “Brad Cox has died”Submitted Why Registers Are Fast and RAM Is Slow as a story · 225 points
HN discussionMy favorite level 5 was a bug in clang that caused it to occasionally emit incorrect code when calling a vararg function. However, the bug was harmless when combined with clang's vararg function prologue. When calling a vararg function compiled with gcc, the clang bug would cause gcc's prologue to jump to a quasi-random address vaguely nearby and continue execution in the middle of some other function. That was grea…
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2013-06-28-anatomy-of-a-compiler-bug.html
on “The Horror in the Standard Library”Submitted Avoid Apress as a story · 172 points
HN discussionProbably downvoted because you're wrong? (Not that I did.) But this is with the caveat that this is comparing a desktop Mac to an iPhone and I haven't the faintest clue about top Android phones, although I have the understanding that the A10 destroys the current Qualcomm SoCs. Here's an instructive article from last year comparing a 2013 Mac Pro and an iPhone 6s: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-04-15-p…
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-04-15-performance-comparisons-of-common-operations-2016-edition.html
on “Autodraw – Fast Drawing for Everyone”Submitted What Is the Secure Enclave? as a story · 163 points
HN discussionMike Ash's Friday Q&A series is always a great investigation of the depths of Objective-C and Cocoa: http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/
Comment linking /pyblog/
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Covariance and Contravariance as a story · 156 points
HN discussion> practically everything is allocated on the heap It has gotten a lot better thanks to tagged pointers: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-07-27-lets-bui... Objective C is mostly used for UI code, and I think it's a fantastic language for that, with its Ruby-like weak typing and strong metaprogramming capabilities.
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2012-07-27-lets-build-tagged-pointers.html
on “Replacing Photoshop with NSString”Submitted Objective-C Blocks vs. C++0x Lambdas: Fight as a story · 119 points
HN discussionThe CPU contains both the UID and GID on all iPhones (old and new). The Secure Enclave, if available, contains it's own UID for it's own key derivation. https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html
on “Snowden: FBI obscuring crucial details in Apple case”Submitted How Swift could potentially be faster than Objective-C as a story · 112 points
HN discussionLet us direct our attention to the superhero Mike Ash and his latest post on secure enclave. https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-... Honestly, this is really the shit..
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html
on “Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack”Submitted Anatomy of a Compiler Bug as a story · 112 points
HN discussionTo be fair, while Swift includes nice convenience methods for strings, the new API comes with a considerable cost: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-11-06-why-is-s...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2015-11-06-why-is-swifts-string-api-so-hard.html
on “Chris Lattner left Swift core team”Submitted A binary coder for Swift as a story · 108 points
HN discussion> Why is string parsing so much harder than it should be? Mike Ash answered[0] this question back in 2015. [0] https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-11-06-why-is-s...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2015-11-06-why-is-swifts-string-api-so-hard.html
on “Chris Lattner left Swift core team”Submitted Secrets of dispatch_once; x86 performance trickery as a story · 107 points
HN discussionNot sure if 100% applies to the iPhone in question, but the secure enclave was designed to prevent this sort of thing. Here's an intro to it: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html
on “Answers to your questions about Apple and security”Submitted Tagged Pointer Strings as a story · 106 points
HN discussionAlthough focussed on the Secure Enclave, this may be of interest: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...
Comment linking /pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html
on “Answers to your questions about Apple and security”Submitted Why Is Swift's String API So Hard? as a story · 97 points
HN discussion> That's at odds with almost every single sentiment I've seen regarding native vs. Web apps. Take one look at any HN thread about the two. If we're talking about e.g. Electron apps, the problem I see mentioned (and felt myself) is almost always the memory hogging, the GC-pauses, the battery impact and such -- not the rendering speed. Although, there is talk of getting to 60fps web apps etc. For something like Atom,…
Comment linking /pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-common-operations-leopard-edition.html
on “Chrome Won”Submitted Observing the A11's Heterogenous Cores as a story · 95 points
HN discussionSuccess: compress.sh: #!/bin/bash echo "#!/bin/bash" echo curl $1 ./compress.sh https://mikeash.com/tmp/randomfile.bin > randomfile.compressedzomg :D /me hides
Comment linking /tmp/randomfile.bin
on ““Should you encrypt or compress first?””Submitted Interesting Swift Features as a story · 94 points
HN discussion
