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Large-scale graph computing at Google
Posted by Grzegorz Czajkowski, Systems Infrastructure TeamIf you squint the right way, you will notice that graphs are everywhere. For example, soc...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 88 posts.
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Where Lisp Fails: at Turning People into Fungible Cogs
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems , "the library question" (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation - one…
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H(m || k) also insecure, you really should use HMAC
The HMAC construction turns a cryptographic hash algorithm into a keyed hash. It is commonly used for integrity protection when the sender and recipient share a secret key. It was developed to addr…
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Self-Enforcing Protocols
There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the police, a judge, or his parents) if he doesn’t think it’s…
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Anatomy of a Program in Memory
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
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Working on It (TextMate)
Over the past two years, posts on this blog have slowed to just a trickle, and a number of TextMate users have asked about TextMate’s status, or publicly worried about its future. This blog post, the first I’ve written here in a long time, is an attempt to assuage those concerns and answer some of the most frequent…
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High Quality Ruby on Rails Example Applications
a digital agency
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Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
Possibly you’ve never heard of it. But if you know anyone who knits or crochets, ask him or (more likely) her about Ravelry and chances are you’re talking to an active member. It’s big. This is an interview with Casey Forbes , who constitutes the whole engineering staff.
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WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08)
New Profiling and Debugging Tools in WebKit
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Problems with TDD
If you have not yet read it, please read Maria Siniaalto's 15 page " Test-Driven Development: empirical body of evidence ." It summarizes the few empirical studies done to evaluate the effectiveness of TDD. In the conclusion you'll find:
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JQuery is a monad
It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to…
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Mockingbird, Cappuccino, and what really matters
What makes an app an app?
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JWZ, on Garbage Collection
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''
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Did You Know: BeautifulSoup's bits are rotting
The parser in version 3.1.0 of Beautiful Soup did significantly worse on real-world HTML than version 3.0.8 did. The most common problems were the incorrect handling of <script> tags, "malformed start tag" errors, and "bad end tag" errors.
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Understanding Engineers
Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
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What is Erlang-Style Concurrency?
Finishing up a whirlwind tour of the US West coast (QCon SF, Erlang Factory Lite LA, and a Cognitive Modeling workshop in Scottsdale), I am now waiting for a delayed BA flight at the Phoenix airport. Although I’ve spent as many days flying as I have on US soil, it’s been a great trip.
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Why is programming fun?
Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.
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Embedding a Web Browser in Emacs
My musings on Emacs, economics, technology, and spiders.