Top all-time · #598
Ryan Fleury
Personal blog · moserware.comsecurityprogramming
Ryan Fleury writes Moserware, a personal blog at moserware.com about security and programming. Since 2007, 102 different Hacker News readers have linked it 140 times, most often “A full TCP/IP stack in under 200 LoC (and the power of DSLs)”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts on TLS and HTTPS handshakes, AES, the Turkey test and TrueSkill, calling them great, fascinating or a good primer.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Called 'excellent', 'fascinating' and 'a great article'; a good primer for TLS; 'still valid reading' despite its age.
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?
- A full TCP/IP stack in under 200 LoC (and the power of DSLs)21 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2009-09-26
- The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)20 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2009-06-10
- A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)15 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2009-09-22
- Computing Your Skill14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2010-03-18
- Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2008-02-16
- Life, Death, and Splitting Secrets5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-11-21
- OMeta#: Who? What? When? Where? Why? (2008)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-04-24
- Who Is This “Licklider” Guy? (2008)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-05-22
- Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-07-20
- /2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-13
What Hacker News says?
I'm reminded about the STEPS report of using ascii art from the rfcs as a DSL for describing tcp: Writeup/comment: http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software... Comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846028 The vpri texts: http://www.vpri.org/writings.php Appendix e and section "A Tiny TCP/IP Using Non-deterministic Parsing" of "STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming: First Year…
Comment linking /2008/04/towards-moores-law-software-part-3-of-3.html
on “Every Byte of a TLS Connection Explained and Reproduced”Submitted The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009) as a story · 549 points
HN discussionThis is what I know; wish I knew more. AES won due to software performance. https://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-adva...
Comment linking /2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html
on “NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government”Submitted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as a story · 267 points
HN discussionSome good ones: http://avc.com/ http://paulgraham.com/ http://www.moserware.com/ https://believermag.com/ https://blogmaverick.com/ https://fs.blog/ https://juliagalef.com/ https://marginalrevolution.com/ https://nav.al/ https://sive.rs/ https://torrentfreak.com/author/ernesto/ https://vitalik.ca/ https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/ https://www.metafilter.com/ https://xkcd.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection as a story · 236 points
HN discussionThe best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some: http://prog21.dadgum.com http://www.moserware.com http://ridiculousfish.com/blog http://wingolog.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009) as a story · 190 points
HN discussionI did not see it in the comments, so here is a great article on how the handshake happens : http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-h...
Comment linking /2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
on “How HTTPS Handshake Happens”Submitted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as a story · 178 points
HN discussionDoes implementing TCP/IP stack using the RFC (as in parsing diagrams straight from RFC) counts? Then it was done in OMeta [1]. Previous discussion: A full TCP/IP stack in under 200 LoC (and the power of DSLs) [2]. There's also a PNG parser (but it is not parsing any documentation) in 20 lines of OMeta [3]. [1] http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84…
Comment linking /2008/04/towards-moores-law-software-part-3-of-3.html
on “A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown”Submitted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (2009) as a story · 137 points
HN discussionRelated: The first few milliseconds of an HTTPS connection ( http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-h... )
Comment linking /2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
on “SSH Handshake Explained”Submitted Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if this covers the entire second question, but it's a fascinating read about HTTPS: http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-h...
Comment linking /2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
on “Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search”Submitted A full TCP/IP stack in under 200 LoC (and the power of DSLs) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionUTF-8 is easy to figure out. However, it's only a doorway to Unicode, and Unicode is not simple . If you do anything more than chopping codepoints and passing them around — use a library. There's a lot of technical complexity due to quirks of Unicode and inherent complexity of world's diverse writing systems. Avoid using concept of a "character" as much as you can, as it's fuzzy, e.g. there are combining characters…
Comment linking /2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html
on “The UTF-8-Everywhere Manifesto”Submitted Computing Your Skill as a story · 92 points
HN discussionYou can eliminate the impedance mismatch entirely by using the specification as your code [1], as Alan Kay's Viewpoints research team did. ;) [1]: http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software...
Comment linking /2008/04/towards-moores-law-software-part-3-of-3.html
on “Ask HN: What are some examples of good code?”Submitted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (2009) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionAhh, Turkey strikes again! The Turkish locale is notoriously difficult to handle for a variety of reasons. One of my colleagues wrote an excellent post about the different ways that Turkish conventions can break your code: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-... This seems to be yet another one!
Comment linking /2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html
on “Lessons Learned: A Year with a Large AngularJS Project”Submitted Who Is This “Licklider” Guy? (2008) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionYou're right that there's more to it to build a full working implementation (including generating and sharing keys). I tried to show that by dissecting HTTPS (TLS): http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-h... I didn't use stick figures in that post, but I used actual traffic with https://amazon.com . Amazon uses RC4, but could just as easily use AES.
Comment linking /2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
on “A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)”Submitted The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionMy 4 cents: - I like the idea of a multiparadigm programming language (many exists) but where you can write part of the code in a different language, not trying to embed everything in the same syntax. I think in this way you can write code and express your ideas differently. - A [social] programming language where some variables and workflows are shared between users [1][2]. - A superreflective programming language…
Comment linking /2008/06/ometa-who-what-when-where-why.html
on “Some programming language ideas”Submitted Computing Your Skill as a story · 73 points
HN discussionOther AES learning resources: https://www.nayuki.io/page/aes-cipher-internals-in-excel , https://www.nayuki.io/res/cryptographic-primitives-in-plain-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard , https://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-adva... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlzxpkdXP58
Comment linking /2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html
on “Rolling your own crypto: Everything you need to build AES from scratch”Submitted A stick figure guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (2009) as a story · 70 points
HN discussionTurkey Test: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-...
Comment linking /2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html
on “Denial of Service Attacks”Submitted Notes from porting C# code to PHP as a story · 70 points
HN discussion
