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Please read the paper before you comment
Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it— maple cocaine (@maplecocaine) January 3, 2019 Yesterday the main character of...
Hillel Wayne
Buttondown is the last email platform you'll migrate to. We're focused on your success, not on bleeding you dry.
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Visit buttondown.email → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jul 2019 – Jul 2024
Software Engineering 39Math & Algorithms 9Career & Management 8Programming Languages 6Tools & Productivity 5Life, Learning & Writing 5
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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Six programming languages I’d like to see
A few weird ideas for programming languages I came up with that it'd be "really" "cool" if someone made (wink)
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Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”
Etymology is fun!
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Why do arrays start at 0?
It's not the reason you think. No, it's not that reason either.
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Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
From a person who really shouldn't be giving others advice.
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Raku: A language for gremlins
By Gremlins, For Gremlins™
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Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
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I prefer rST to Markdown
I will never stop dying on this hill
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The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging
Trying out this newsletter thing... It's sort of astonishing to think about how much value I've gotten from Twitter over the last few years. At its best, my...
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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control
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I have complicated feelings about TDD
They're not all good and not all bad
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Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages
There are roughly three classes of language features: Features that the language is effectively designed around, such that you can't add it after the fact....
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Don't write documentation in Markdown
Please don't write your documentation in Markdown. Please. I'm begging you. Markdown is tolerable for short documentation, like a readme.md. Past that, it's...
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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
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The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
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Just use a monorepo
In which I tell you that you're overcomplicating things and you should throw everything behind a single git repository.
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Problems harder than NP-Complete
People always talk about "P vs NP" like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification....
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Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
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A brief introduction to interval arithmetic
Why x^2 isn't always x*x.
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If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like...
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Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
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Melange 1.0: Compile OCaml / ReasonML to JavaScript
Hey folks, this is a special one. Melange 1.0 The Melange team and I are thrilled to announce the release of Melange 1.0 today, marking a major milestone in...
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Software Mise En Place
I am really, really into cooking. In the heady days of 2016 I regularly threw dinner parties for 30+ people. These days I don't hate myself that much, but...
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The Case of a Curious SQL Query
Languages that suffer success often have to do so by selling out and adding features that go against some of the original purposes of their design. SQL is a...
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Why UML “Really” Died
There's this post going around the internet called Has UML died without anyone noticing?, In the piece, Ernesto Garbarino says that UML was killed by...
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Cryptography Dispatches: Hello World, and OpenPGP Is Broken
This is the inaugural issue of Cryptography Dispatches, meant to be quick, frequent and lightly edited discussions of cryptographic topics. Longer form can be found at blog.filippo.io. If you are not reading this in your email client, you can subscribe here .
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Stop Building Closed Ecosystems
I'm sick of it. In the world of mobile development (though likely also elsewhere), we sink so much engineering talent into making tools that are great...
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Edge Case Poisoning (2020)
TLA+ Workshop Last Call The TLA+ workshop is next week! Oct 20-22, register here, use the code COMPUTRONSTUFF for $500 off. Learn how a few hours of...
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Collecting and curating material is good and we should do it more
Chronicling, plugin systems, and six other disjointed ideas combine in an argument of how to "engineerize" software more