Paul Adams Smith
pauladamsmith.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2010
Paul Adams Smith, a software engineer, writes on Redis internals, the LLVM C API, Go, OpenBSD networking, and the Healthcare.gov rescue.
What HN saysHN links it for Redis source walkthroughs, an LLVM C API starter guide, and his account of the Healthcare.gov rescue.
21HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
26stories submitted
987story points
8 months agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Redis: under the hood5 people · 90 points · first shared 2011 · 12 comments on HN
- 2How to get started with the LLVM C API4 people · 69 points · first shared 2015 · 12 comments on HN
- 3More Redis internals: Tracing a GET & SET3 people · 23 points · first shared 2011 · 3 comments on HN
- 4The ten year anniversary of the Healthcare.gov rescue3 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns2 people · 189 points · first shared 2025 · 55 comments on HN
- 6Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer2 people · 163 points · first shared 2018 · 48 comments on HN
- 7The DNC's voter registration app is now free and open-source software2 people · 67 points · first shared 2013 · 18 comments on HN
- 8Looking at your program’s structure in Go 1.71 people · 238 points · first shared 2016 · 53 comments on HN
- 9Redis: under the hood1 people · 84 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 10Parsing and formatting date/time in Go1 people · 41 points · first shared 2011 · 9 comments on HN
- 11Cheatsheet for jj's builtin diff editor1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 12Let `jj absorb` help you keep a clean commit history1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Del.icio.us is dead, long live del.icio.us1 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 14Simple max clients implementation for a Go net/http handler1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 15Use Oplop for your web site passwords1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
kimsey0 · 2024-03-13
A good reminder to read about how it almost didn't turn out alright.
* https://time.com/10228/obamas-trauma-team/
* https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2023/10/the-10-year-anniversary-of-…
(And of course the related Hacker News threads.)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37957152
jakewins · 2023-10-23
I realize this isn’t what you’re arguing for, but as a cautionary anecdote on this topic:
Paul alludes to it in his post about Healthcare.gov from the other day, but this was apparently one of the major parts of the failure there - endless lines of code generated from UML diagrams, making reading the code hard and things like “can we add a trace statement here” difficult.
Optimising for diagrams-as-source-of-truth has drawbacks for debugging and maintainability of the running code
https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2023/10/the-10-year-anniversary-of-…
upofadown · 2021-11-21
I am not sure what is meant by this. It certainly seems to have QoS in the form of the queue directive. It works for me for limiting buffer bloat on my VDSL model upstream. The defaults work well for my VOIP stuff so that all I have is this in my pf.conf:
queue outq on re1 flows 1024 bandwidth 3000K max 3000K qlimit 1024 default
I think the magic is in the "flows" part.
Added: Relevant articles:
* https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-08-30-openbsd-qos-lan.html
* https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2018/07/fixing-bufferbloat-on-your-…
ygra · 2017-01-02
I rather understood it that they wanted to know whether there is a C API to use LLVM, so perhaps something like this: https://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2015/01/how-to-get-started-with-llvm-c-…
latenightcoding · 2016-05-11
NonEUCitizen · 2015-01-21
Should be this url instead:
https://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2015/01/how-to-get-started-with-llvm-c-…
rch · 2014-04-17
Take a look at Redis sometime. You might want to actually work on it a bit to help internalize what you're reading. Here are a couple of articles that might help get you started:
http://pauladamsmith.com/articles/redis-under-the-hood.html
http://www.starkiller.net/2013/05/03/hacking-redis-adding-interval-set…
mmahemoff · 2013-01-30
This issue came up again recently with the Democrats' voter registration application (http://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2013/01/dnc_voter_reg_foss.html).
The take-home is don't do that. Don't modify a standard open source contract on a whim as it will inevitably cause serious hassle later. Okay if you have some major ethical/legal objection, then just beware it will cause some major hassle.
JSON is an exception. It came along when the programming world was desperate to be liberated from XML bondage...a fine solution surfaced at the right place and right time. And also at a time when people cared less about open source license specifics. For any average project, you're adding more barriers to adoption than you probably realise.
(I said more about this the last time http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762261)
paulsmith · 2011-05-25
As a user, I assume the site is not going to do the right thing with my password. That's why I securely generate a new password for each site using a master passphrase. Oplop is a good, zero-install tool for doing this. http://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2010/12/oplop.html