Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 161 posts.
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
[2016-10-26] First version of the article [2016-10-28] Presentation at Soft-Shake Conference, Geneva ( slides ) [2016-11-01] Article and comments in The Register [2017-11-16] Presentation at Black Alps Security Conference, Yverdon ( slides ) [2018-03-09] Presentation at Toulouse Hacking Conference ( slides )…
Some time later, I came across Iavor’s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called “ The Evolution of a Programmer ” in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment’s thought turned up the factorial…
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
interviewer: Welcome, can I get you coffee or anything? Do you need a break? me: No, I've probably had too much coffee already! interviewer: Great, great. And are you OK with writing code on the...
People often choose Redux before they need it. “What if our app doesn’t scale without it?” Later, developers frown at the indirection Redux…
Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
Feature Flags can be categorized into several buckets; manage each appropriately. Smart implementation can help constrain complexity.
In this post I’ll try to explain how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works and how you can reuse it in your own applications. It’s a very…
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
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…
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C…
Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember m...
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
Tero Parviainen
Serverless architectures replace a managed server with a collection of third party services and FaaS
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
A small number of popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries account for a substantial portion of the network, battery, and time budgets of users of the contemporary Web. Many applications include these libraries even if they only use a small portion of the functionality they provide. Large improvements seem possible…
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
