Top all-time · #1125
Poul-Henning Kamp
Personal blog · phk.freebsd.dksystemsprogramming
Poul-Henning Kamp writes PHKs Bikeshed — PHKs Bikeshed, a personal blog at phk.freebsd.dk about systems and programming. Since 2010, 64 different Hacker News readers have linked it 78 times, most often “The Bikeshed Email – PHKs Bikeshed”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Bikeshed Email – PHKs Bikeshed5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-11-15
- /time/index.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-12-20
- Poul henning kamp's thoughts on HTTP/2.03 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-07-10
- phkmalloc3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-16
- The archaeology of virtualization (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-25
- Jails: Confining the omnipotent root.[pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-09
- /time/20140926.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-12-19
- /pubs/malloc.pdf3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-05
- NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-03
- The Bikeshed Email (1999)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-19
What Hacker News says?
He influenced my career as much as Dennis and Ken did. Our "nanokernel" paper brought NTP into the nanosecond domain and gave FreeBSD "timecounters". But our true shared passion was Loran-C Dave even invented the 16-pulse "tactical Loran-C" during the Vietnam War. I borrowed his ISA card Loran-C receiver (serial #1 & only) and later I built two generations of SDR receivers, and he was so proud when I showed him this…
Comment linking /AducLoran/animation2.gif
on “Dave Mills has died”Submitted You're doing it wrong: B-heap 10x faster than binary heap (2010) as a story · 229 points
HN discussionVarnish ( http://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/_book2.pdf )
Comment linking /misc/_book2.pdf
on “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar ”Submitted Md5crypt is no longer strong enough as a story · 176 points
HN discussionI did watch, thanks, but anyone in a hurry can get just the slides here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2014.pdf I particularly appreciated the "QUEEN success example: SSC" (self-signed certificates, starts at slide 23), which also got a good laugh from the audience ... (if you're just watching the video, this is the text of the second slide in the PDF, not shown at FOSDEM: """ What is this ? This is a fict…
Comment linking /_downloads/FOSDEM_2014.pdf
on “"OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable"”Submitted Lawnmower robots – the end of VLF time signals? as a story · 96 points
HN discussionFor a much more detailed perspective about time, and still rather accessible, check Poul-Henning Kamp's work: http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/timecounter.pdf http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/
Comment linking /pubs/timecounter.pdf
on “What every programmer should know about time”Submitted phkmalloc as a story · 82 points
HN discussionHmmm… and ElGamal's signing scheme didn't qualify? I don't think that's a reason, or even an excuse: Schnorr actually did claim his patent read on DSA. (That obviously never went anywhere, and the US Government, in a show of force via the NSA, filed their own patent on DSA.) The NSA also really doesn't seem to have had much of a problem negotiating the licensing of patents with industry participants in the past! It…
Comment linking /_downloads/FOSDEM_2014.pdf
on “Making sure crypto remains insecure [pdf]”Submitted HP1345A (and wargames) (2017) as a story · 48 points
HN discussionYou forgot the part where FreeBSD 4.0 added jails in March 2000 [1]. You could argue that jails were inspired by chroot(), and that's correct, but that's hardly any isolation. [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf
on “Microsoft announces Hyper-V Containers”Submitted First Time as a story · 35 points
HN discussionBSD jails date back to FreeBSD 4, which was released in 2000. Edit: I started questioning my memory of this, so I poked around some. Poul-Henning Kamp did the initial work in April, 1999, here is the commit: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=46155 More details from him about it: http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/jails/
Comment linking /sagas/jails/
on “A Linux sysadmin's introduction to cgroups”Submitted A hack to monitor your natural gas meter by Beerware license creator as a story · 26 points
HN discussionThat's puttering, tinkering, or experimenting. It's a good thing. Bikeshedding is wasting time on trivial and pointless efforts or discussions. It's a bad thing. :) https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Comment linking /sagas/bikeshed/
on “$30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener (2024)”Submitted The archaeology of virtualization (2014) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYes, you probably shouldn't use any kind of binary trees. This has been a sort of open secret for years. I first learned about it from phk(Poul-Henning Kamp)'s 2010 article, "You're doing it wrong". See http://phk.freebsd.dk/B-Heap/queue.html .
Comment linking /B-Heap/queue.html
on “Use perfect hashing, instead of binary search, for keyword lookup”Submitted phkmalloc as a story · 8 points
HN discussionGood one. More context on the ideas and proposal Poul-Henning has put on the table: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html
Comment linking /words/httpbis.html
on “HTTP/2.0 – Please admit defeat”Submitted NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report as a story · 5 points
HN discussionOnly three (of many) Unix-like families have containers, and while Linux was last "to the punch" the others only had them for a few years more. FreeBSD Jails were ready by 2000[1], Solaris Zones were released in 2005[2], and cgroups were merged in 2007. But OpenVZ's containers technology had already existed since 2005, and I would argue that most of the modern Linux "container" infrastructure came from their experie…
Comment linking /pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf
on “Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation”Submitted WarGames and the HP1345A digital vector display as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> If an organization is in a position to confiscate the camera from a journalist, they're almost certainly ALSO in a position to extract the encryption password from the journalist. This is basically why GBDE exists. See s.s. 4.1 "Protecting the user" of http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf The drawback is that GBDE is for cold storage protection (which I imagine could be okay in a camera).
Comment linking /pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf
on “Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras”Submitted Phkmalloc as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEven though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates. I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens. https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/
Comment linking /VML/2025/
on “Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation”Submitted Jails – High value but shitty Virtualization (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHis proposal is at http://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/draft-kamp-httpbis-http-20-archit... It comes with the caveats that "Please disregard any strangeness in the boilerplate, I may not thrown all the right spells at xml2rfc, and also note that I have subsequently changed my mind on certain subjects, most notably Cookies which should simply be exterminated from HTTP/2.0, and replaced with a stable session/identity concept w…
Comment linking /misc/draft-kamp-httpbis-http-20-architecture-01.txt
on “Varnish author criticizing HTTP/2.0 proposals”Submitted Jails – High value but shitty Virtualization (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality * http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/
Comment linking /sagas/bikeshed/
on “Is It Time to Kill the Penny?”Submitted The Bikeshed Email – PHKs Bikeshed as a story · 2 points
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