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research!rsc
Personal blog · research.swtch.comprogrammingsystems
research!rsc is a personal blog at research.swtch.com about programming and systems. Since 2008, 494 different Hacker News readers have linked it 769 times, most often “QArt – Pictures in QR code with no inherent errors”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for Russ Cox's write-ups on zip files, Acme, Go generics and dependencies, and his xz timeline, which one commenter calls a perfect summary.
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?
- QArt – Pictures in QR code with no inherent errors27 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2017-05-28
- The Generics Dilemma24 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2012-03-14
- Go and Versioning: Minimal Version Selection23 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2018-02-21
- /gorace21 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2016-12-29
- Go and Versioning20 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2018-02-21
- Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)19 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2017-02-16
- Version SAT19 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2016-12-13
- The Generic Dilemma (2009)15 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2017-01-09
- A Tour of the Acme Editor15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2012-09-17
- Self-reproducing Lempel-Ziv [zip/gzip] streams13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2012-03-06
What Hacker News says?
This is perfect summary https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline
Comment linking /xz-timeline
on “Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise”Submitted Timeline of the xz open source attack as a story · 1069 points
HN discussionHere's a few fun ones: the Burrows–Wheeler transform, suffix arrays in general, Kanerva's fully distributed representation, reduced-affine-arithmetic numbers, LSM trees, binary array sets, sparse array sets, and gap buffers. (I'm not sure how nobody had mentioned gap buffers yet on the thread, but if they did I didn't see it.) — ⁂ — The Burrows-Wheeler transform is the second character of each suffix in a (cyclic) s…
Comment linking /sparse
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted The xz attack shell script as a story · 606 points
HN discussion"This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job in certain situations. The sleaziness of uninitialized data access is offset by performance improvem…
Comment linking /sparse
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Our Software Dependency Problem as a story · 405 points
HN discussionThe tool `eqn`, which she wrote (joined by Brian Kernighan) is an "ancestor" of TeX: The mathematical syntax of TeX (design started 1977) was based on eqn (1975). For example, the eqn paper ( https://research.swtch.com/eqn.pdf ) has the expression sum from i=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2 which would have been entered as something pretty close to that in the first draft design of TeX (the second draft introduced…
Comment linking /eqn.pdf
on “Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died”Submitted Go += Package Versioning as a story · 336 points
HN discussionZIP files can: https://research.swtch.com/zip
Comment linking /zip
on “Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms”Submitted Glob Matching Can Be Simple and Fast Too as a story · 333 points
HN discussionhttps://research.swtch.com/zip it is basically a quine.
Comment linking /zip
on “I use zip bombs to protect my server”Submitted My Go Resolutions for 2017 as a story · 329 points
HN discussionThat's far from the ultimate zip bomb. 42.zip has five layers. But you can make a zip file that has an infinite number of layers. See https://research.swtch.com/zip or https://alf.nu/ZipQuine
Comment linking /zip
on “I use zip bombs to protect my server”Submitted Hash-based bisect debugging in compilers and runtimes as a story · 254 points
HN discussionSee https://research.swtch.com/zip for how to make an infinite zip bomb: ie a zip file that unzips to itself, so you can keep unzipping forever without ever hitting bottom.
Comment linking /zip
on “I use zip bombs to protect my server”Submitted Updating the Go Memory Model as a story · 248 points
HN discussionThat's an improvement, but ultimately not enough, actually. The article hits at this, and you should definitely read it: Being able to send xz patches to the Linux kernel would have been a nice point of leverage for Jia Tan's future work. We're not at trusting trust [1] levels yet, but it would be one step closer. [1]: https://research.swtch.com/nih
Comment linking /nih
on “Timeline of the xz open source attack”Submitted What NPM should do to stop a new colors attack as a story · 237 points
HN discussionA service that measured "credibility" or "activity" of a username/email could be really useful here. At least, it would be a leading indicator that something _might_ be up. In particular the aside here about the email addresses are suspect: https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline#jia_tan_becomes_maint... would be useful info for Lasse Collins before taking the pressure campaign seriously.
Comment linking /xz-timeline
on “Timeline of the xz open source attack”Submitted Go and Dogma as a story · 194 points
HN discussion- https://research.swtch.com/vgo - https://github.com/golang/dep
Comment linking /vgo
on “Things I Regret About Node.js [video]”Submitted Programming Language Memory Models as a story · 180 points
HN discussionSounds like it might be fun to load one's devices with infinite zips labelled with tempting filenames, like "red light district itinerary.zip". https://research.swtch.com/zip
Comment linking /zip
on “Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords”Submitted Go’s Version Control History as a story · 179 points
HN discussionJVM semantics[1] don't allow this to corrupt program state arbitrarily, just the data variables in question, right? Whereas in Go.. Search for "corruption" in https://research.swtch.com/gomm [1] Not just Java, meaning all the many nice JVM languages enjoy this is as well, eg Clojure, Scala etc
Comment linking /gomm
on “This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem”Submitted The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World as a story · 177 points
HN discussionAssembler^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMachine code: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html https://research.swtch.com/mel
Comment linking /mel
on “Go is Google's language, not ours”Submitted The Principles of Versioning in Go as a story · 174 points
HN discussionWell, I decided I'll play with acme* editor a little bit, if I can't get on well with it, I'll probably go that way. * http://research.swtch.com/acme
Comment linking /acme
on “Neovim”Submitted Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles as a story · 174 points
HN discussion
