Top all-time · #16392
Sam Lewis
Personal blog · samlewis.meprogrammingsystems
Sam Lewis's personal blog at samlewis.me covers programming and systems. Since 2016, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “How do Mesh VPNs work? Writing my own VPN tool in Golang to find out”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this post as a resource for understanding how Bitcoin works at a lower level. It walks through building a tiny Bitcoin client that sends transactions to get included in the blockchain.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sam Lewis is a Melbourne based geek who develops cool bits of code. He likes data, embedded stuff and AFL.
Most-linked posts?
- How do Mesh VPNs work? Writing my own VPN tool in Golang to find out2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-07
- A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-06-05
What Hacker News says?
Shameless self-promotion but there's also this post I wrote in 2017 if anyone interested in a slightly different take (but a very similar write up to the OP): https://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/ Cool that this article implements the cryptography primitives, though! e: Funnily, like the article, I also stored some BTC in a wallet and challenged people to (manually) take/steal it. At the time i…
Comment linking /2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
on “A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python”Submitted A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction as a story · 241 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in the nitty gritty of the mechanics of Bitcoin, check out my blog post: http://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
Comment linking /2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
on “Ask HN: Resources to learn blockchain and smart contracts?”Submitted How do Mesh VPNs work? Writing my own VPN tool in Golang to find out as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne good resource for understanding on how Bitcoin works on a lower level is this article: http://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/ It goes through the details of creating a tiny Bitcoin client that can send transactions so that they will get included in the blockchain.
Comment linking /2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
on “Ask HN: A good primer on cryptocurrencies?”Submitted How do Mesh VPNs work? Writing my own VPN tool in Golang to find out as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGitHub Pages with a static site generator and Travis CI is superb. I have my blog [0] setup so that all I need to do in order to publish a new article is add a markdown file to my GitHub pages source repo. Travis then builds the html and pushes it back to the GitHub pages repo. You can easily add files and edit markdown on the GitHub web interface so I essentially use GitHub as a CRM. If you're interested, have a lo…
Comment linking /
on “Which service do you use to host static website?”Submitted Getting started with the xv6 operating system as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTheres a number of DNS seed servers that are hard coded into the Bitcoin core codebase. A Bitcoin client does a nslookup on these seeds to find intial peers to connect to and bootstraps this way. For a bit more detail and if you're interested in this sort of thing, have a read of my blog article I wrote about the technical side of Bitcoin: http://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
Comment linking /2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/
on “Bitcoin Workings Explained, for Real”Submitted Creating a mesh VPN tool for fun and learning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionShameless plug but I was also interested in the magic behind these mesh networking tools, so I wrote my own toy version that was very much inspired by the tools you mentioned. I blogged about it here: https://www.samlewis.me/2021/07/creating-mesh-vpn-tool-for-f... The short answer to your question though is that the packets are sent over a secure tunnel.
Comment linking /2021/07/creating-mesh-vpn-tool-for-fun/
on “Ask HN: Real-world Tailscale business use case”Submitted An brief intro to unit testing embedded C code as a story · 2 points
HN discussion