Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 439 posts.
When Apple introduced Bitcode and made it mandatory on watchOS and tvOS, they kinda hand-waved away questions about why it existed, with nebulous claims about it being useful to tune-up binaries by utilizing the latest compiler improvements.
This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
Let's take a quick look at what compile-time execution looks like in Zig.
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
Back in 2013, I was beginning to get the sense that data breaches were becoming a big thing. The prevalence of them seemed to be really ramping up as was the impact they were having on those of us that found ourselves in them, myself included. Increasingly, I was writing
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one o…
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019404 points166 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
If there is one pattern this book couldn’t live without, this is it. Game loops are the quintessential example of a “game programming pattern”. Almost every game has one, no two are exactly alike, and relatively few programs outside of games use them.
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
Discussions: Hacker News (347 points, 37 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (151 points, 19 comments) Translations: Chinese (Simplified), French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian “There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that…
Update: the matplotlib pull request has been merged! See This post for a description of the XKCD functionality now built-in to matplotlib!
We usually perceive that it costs more to get higher quality, but software internal quality actually reduces costs.
Spectrum is an open source chat app for large online communities. With the benefit of hindsight, here are the technology choices I regret.
Proton Mail disputed some of the content of the post originally published at this location. We will continue the discussion directly with Proton Mail, in particular at a meeting in …
Beautiful Racket
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
The question of “What is a tech company” comes down to how much software and its unique characteristics affects the company’s core business.
Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
This blog post is about how we added package versioning to Go, in the form of Go modules, and the reasons we made the choices we did. It is adapted and updated from a talk I gave at GopherCon Singapore in 2018 .
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
