Home page of Nathaniel J. Smith, research scientist at UC Berkeley who studies how people use and understand language.
Visit vorpus.org → On Hacker News Nov 2016 – Mar 2020
Software Engineering 4Systems & Performance 2Programming Languages 2Society, Policy & Culture 1Career & Management 1
[Edit: Welcome Hacker News readers! Before we dive into the neat memory management esoterica, I want to briefly note that as engineers we have an ethical obligation in our work to consider the "safety, health, and welfare of the public" , because if we don't, terrible things happen . This is a challenging…
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio . These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some…
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…