[HN Gopher] Paged Out Issue #8 [pdf]
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Paged Out Issue #8 [pdf]
Author : SteveHawk27
Score : 277 points
Date : 2026-02-19 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pagedout.institute)
(TXT) w3m dump (pagedout.institute)
| mrled wrote:
| They've got a new web viewer in this issue that can be used to
| link to individual articles and might be nicer than reading a PDF
| on some screens:
| https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=1
| jstrieb wrote:
| The article I submitted has an HTML tag in the title, and seems
| to have broken the web viewer :(
|
| Note that you can link to pages in a PDF with a hash like
| #page=64 (for example) in the URL.
|
| https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_008.pdf#page=64
| gynvael wrote:
| Whoops. Looking into it.
|
| EDIT: Fixed. It wasn't the tags - it was a trailing space we
| had in the "database". I honestly though I've handled that
| case, but apparently not .
| jstrieb wrote:
| Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I
| submitted my article.
|
| Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped
| from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for
| that article in the contents is missing a word. No big
| deal, but good to know for future submissions!
| gynvael wrote:
| This goes to the "fix me" list. We're planning a rebuild
| in the next few days anyway, so it should get fixed then.
| e12e wrote:
| Still would like a straight html version for reading on a
| phone. One with resizable text and proper reflow.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I love Paged Out -- it's basically the only modern equivalent to
| 1980s _BYTE_ or _Dr. Dobbs Journal_ today.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| There's also Proof Of Concept Or GTFO edited by Pastor Manuel
| LaPhroaig https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo
| bayindirh wrote:
| Boy, PoC||GTFO is my favorite "magazine".
|
| No, not giving spoilers except there might be some polyglot
| files.
| progbits wrote:
| I can highly recommend buying these printed in the "bible
| style" binding with finger cutouts, ribbon bookmark and
| everything.
|
| https://nostarch.com/gtfo3
| lioeters wrote:
| Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm
| feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the
| culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of
| liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our
| hands.
| giahug wrote:
| yes!
| amelius wrote:
| > Query based compilers are all the rage: Rust, Swift, Kotlin,
| Haskell, and Clang all structure their compilers as queries.
|
| I've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into
| details.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23644391
| thunderseethe wrote:
| It is a double edged sword of the single page layout that you
| really have to make one point briefly and get out of there. I
| had to pare down many details to fit the layout.
|
| If you want to learn more about query based compilers as a
| concept, I highly recommend ollef's aritcle:
| https://ollef.github.io/blog/posts/query-based-compilers.htm...
|
| If you want to learn how to implement a query based compiler, I
| have a tutorial on that here:
| https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/lsp-base/ (which I also highly
| recommend but that might be more obvious since I wrote it)
| neandrake wrote:
| Finding this one-page was great! It gave me a new term I didn't
| have before that leads to all sorts of new materials to go
| rifling through.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| I feel like this tweet suggests that the PDF is a polyglot or an
| embedded second PDF.
|
| https://x.com/gynvael/status/2024180784064598134
| bayindirh wrote:
| Initial impressions says no about being that file a polyglot.
|
| If you like polyglot files, see
| https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Oh yeah. I have the paperback 'bible'. I don't think that
| that one is a polyglot, though.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Can't you use the tome as a cluebat?
|
| I believe it's a dual use tool, hence a polyglot.
| gynvael wrote:
| PoC||GTFO is the GOAT
| gynvael wrote:
| Ah, no, sorry, no polyglots there yet. We'll get there one day,
| but so far our tooling doesn't allow for it yt.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Thank you. I love the wallpapers of Paged Out and always set it
| as my default wallpaper on MacOS.
| maremmano wrote:
| I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t
| zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a
| suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little
| more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal,
| and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus
| this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me.
| Life just wasn't so heavy back then.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| like Mondo 2000 :)
| gynvael wrote:
| TIL :D
| big_toast wrote:
| Wow cool. I have not heard of Mondo 2000 reading hn for
| almost 20 years. And did not realize Boing Boing was so old.
| Makes me wonder what else existed.
|
| My family had a bunch of "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer
| Calisthenics & Orthodontia"[0] and similar things (BYTE,
| COMPUTE!). (Which seem slightly dryer, but maybe more like
| Paged Out.)
|
| [0]:https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/mode/
| 2up
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I still have my Mondo 2000 zine. It was literally a futurist
| guidebook for cyberpunk of today. Better living through
| chemistry, memes, cybernetics were all predicted by Mondo.
| gynvael wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles
| in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather:
| let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it
| too).
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Sadly I don't know if that kind of 80s/90s irreverence would go
| well with today's sensitivities.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| that's the point! we got so concerned with creating a safe
| space for everyone that can't possible offend we lost site of
| the community building intent. The crux is to have people
| self-select without offending them, but IMO it's not a binary
| goal.
| ihaveone wrote:
| This is so awesome, do you have a mailing list, RSS, etc?
| burkaman wrote:
| They have both, see the bottom of the home page:
| https://pagedout.institute/
| angelofthe0dd wrote:
| It has a little bit of a "2600 vibe" but with a more modern look
| and feel. This is the first issue I've read, and I like it.
| vunderba wrote:
| Awesome! Was looking forward to the next issue. _Paged Out_
| reminds me a lot of the old-school 2600 Hacker Quarterly
| periodical back in the 80s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
| thinkmassive wrote:
| 2600 is still being published!
|
| https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions
| brunoqc wrote:
| Has the quality declined over the years?
|
| I get the 2600 zine at a local book store and I like it but
| there's a lot of articles that I don't really care about.
|
| It might be a good thing though.
| wang_li wrote:
| A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to
| be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or
| unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing
| supporting the headline.
|
| E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard
| you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The
| result in the article is obvious if you know that.
|
| Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
|
| > While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial,
| doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so
| straightforward.
|
| Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was
| able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE
| 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
|
| I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to
| be click-baity and I find that off putting.
| gynvael wrote:
| You're right.
|
| In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is
| an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field
| covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for
| an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to
| learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
|
| What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge
| scientific journal -- rather than that, we publish even the
| smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and
| find it fun/interesting to learn.
|
| The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit
| clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
|
| On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only
| 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the
| list ;)
|
| P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)
| layer8 wrote:
| I noticed that as well. Also misleading titles like
| "Eliminating Serialization Cost using B-trees" where the cost
| savings are actually for _de_ serialization (from a custom
| format), and neither the self-balancing nature of B-trees isn't
| actually relevant, as no insertion/deletion of nodes occurs in
| the (de)serialization scenario, so a single tree level is
| sufficient. It's a stretch to refer to it as a B-tree.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Some nice art in there too.
| j2kun wrote:
| I took a peak at "Compiler Education Deserves a Revolution" and
| thought, wtf is this talking about?
|
| It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the
| compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along
| to the next pass."
|
| What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing
| and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant
| to the actual work of building a compiler.
| sigbottle wrote:
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/seth-juarez/anders-h...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317
|
| https://lobste.rs/s/dwf2yn/sixten_s_query_based_compiler
|
| https://ericlippert.com/2012/06/08/red-green-trees/
|
| Rust's salsa, etc.
|
| Related search terms are incremental compilation and red-green
| trees. It's primarily an ide driven workflow (well, the
| original use case was driven by ides), but the principles
| behind it are very interesting.
|
| You can grok the difference by thinking through, for example,
| the difference between invoking `g++` on the command line -
| include all headers, then compile object files via includes,
| re-do all template deduction, etc. and one where editing a
| single line in a single file doesn't change the entire data
| structure much and force entire recompilation (this doesn't
| need full ownership of editing either by hooking UI events or
| keylogging: have a directory watcher treat the file diff as a
| patch, and then send it to the server in patch form; the
| observation being that compiling an O(n) size file is often way
| more expensive than a program that goes through the entire file
| a few times and generates a patch)
|
| AST's are similar to these kinds of trees only insofar as the
| underlying data structure to understand programming languages
| are syntax trees.
|
| I've always wanted to get into this stuff but it's hard!
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| this is absolutely magnificent, and exactly the kind of thing i
| wish there were more of in the world.
| roer wrote:
| I have the printed versions of issue #6 and #7, I highly
| recommend them!
|
| https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pagedout
| throawayonthe wrote:
| [re: page 40 NTP-over-HTTP] ooh i've heard of this! it's being
| used in real life by Whonix (sdwdate) and Tails (tails-
| htp/htpdate)
|
| https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Sdwdate
| https://tails.net/contribute/design/Time_syncing/
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(page generated 2026-02-19 23:00 UTC)