Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase “Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industy” in late 2004. It’s a scary analogy, but an apt one. I’ve seen developers struggle for years with the
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
There's an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says "Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn't it?". Feet shuffle awkwardly. Someone clears their throat and before you
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
An in-depth exploration of a new class of expressive, performant, and intuitive CRDTs, together with macOS and iOS sample code.
Quick summary of my recommendations on compare-by-hash: If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years. For example, BitTorrent falls into this category, but rsync doesn't. Keep in mind that new…
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover , mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly…
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
Be as the reed, not the oak tree. Green threads are just threads.
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.
