1381
Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom
I will attempt to convince you, in two lines of code, that Elixir is more interesting than any programming language you’ve ever used.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
1382
I Broke Rust's Package Manager for Windows Users
Last weekend I was playing around with a way to represent null-terminated UTF8 strings in Rust. Rather than just toying with it forever, I decided ...
1383
1384
Zero Cost Abstractions
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
1385
If PHP Were British
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
1386
Poll on macOS 10.12 is broken
When Mac OS X first launched they did so without an existing poll function. They later added poll() in Mac OS X 10.3, but we quickly discovered that it was broken (it returned a non-zero value when asked to wait for nothing) so in the curl project we added a check in configure for that … Continue reading poll on mac…
1387
Forth: The programming language that writes itself
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
1388
Improving the security of your SSH private key files
Update (July 2015): This post is now rather outdated, and the procedure for modifying your private key files is no longer recommended. A better solution is to use ssh-keygen -o .
1389
Zig's New Async I/O
In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today , here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025 .
1390
RCE in Visual Studio Code's Remote WSL for Fun and Negative Profit
The Visual Studio Code server in Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a local WebSocket WebSocket connection to communicate with the Remote WSL extension. JavaScript in websites can connect to this server and execute arbitrary commands on the target system. Assigned CVE-2021-43907 and zero bounty. I paid 5 USD for the EC2…
1391
Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)
This tutorial is free and open source, and all code uses the MIT license - so you are free to do with it as you like. My hope is that you will enjoy the tutorial, and make great games!
1392
Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
1393
How to Learn Nix
It's like a Let's Play, but for obscure software documentation. I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.
1394
“Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)
The "design patterns" movement in software claims to have been inspired by the works of architect Christopher Alexander. But an examination of Alexander's books reveals that he was actually talking about something much more interesting.
1395
Perfect email regex finally found
Finding the best regular expression for validating e-mail addresses
1396
Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
1397
Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
Why self-host Zig?<br> For great justice, of course… and also a few more reasons actually.
1398
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
1399
How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button
UPDATE: I’m now selling ready-to-use buttons at Buttonjoy.com!
1400
Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output
Why you should escape output correctly, but generally not sanitize user input.
1401
Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
1402
Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
1403
Finding the “second bug” in glibc’s condition variable
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_s…
1404
“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
1405
We need less powerful languages
We need languages and systems that are less powerful, not more powerful, and easy ways to create and use such languages.
1406
Complexities of e-mail validation logic
Nope, you don't know how to validate an email address. Even if you think you'd get the domain part right, fuggeddabout the local part. Seriously.
1407
Breaking the web with hash-bangs
Update 10 Feb 2011 : Tim Bray has written a much shorter, clearer and less technical explanation of the broken use of hash-bangs URLs . I thoroughly recommend reading and referencing it.
1408
Git in six hundred words
(This essay is a companion piece to Gitlet, my implementation of Git in JavaScript.)
1409
Flattening ASTs and other compiler data structures
This is an introduction to data structure flattening, a special case of arena allocation that is a good fit for programming language implementations. We build a simple interpreter twice, the normal way and the flat way, and show that some fairly mechanical code changes can give you a 2.4× speedup.
1410
The Linux Graphics Stack
This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…