Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
This PEP specifies how Python software packages should specify what build dependencies they have in order to execute their chosen build system. As part of this specification, a new configuration file is introduced for software packages to use to specify...
I've written previously about the problem recursive descent parsers have with expressions, especially when the language has multiple levels of operator precedence.
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
The Modus themes for Emacs meet the highest accessibility standard for colour contrast. This is their official manual.
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin ), Google Code would no longer host the project.
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
This PEP suggests to support non-ASCII letters (such as accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Kanji, etc.) in Python identifiers.
Protobuf, the binary format crafted by Google, surpasses JSON performance even on JavaScript environments like Node.js/V8 and web browser...
For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters - Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF).
FOUT is what I’m calling the flash of unstyled text that you get while using @font-face in Firefox and Opera.
Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
[LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
The Backend Infrastructure team at Discord was hard at work improving the scalability and performance of our core real-time communications infrastructure.
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
An introduction to Go errors.
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
