Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 267 posts.
Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…
What a query-based compiler is and what they are good for.
This PEP adds support for syntactic macros to Python. A macro is a compile-time function that transforms a part of the program to allow functionality that cannot be expressed cleanly in normal library code.
In episode 379 of ATP both Marco Arment and John Siracusa described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to macOS 10.15.
There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…
I'll try to leave the pulp in here and keep this as chronological as I can. In that spirit, no tweets were harmed in the making of this post.
One of the most exciting things about the Rust programming language is that it makes infrastructure incredibly boring. That’s not a bad thing, in this case. No one wants their electrical wiring to be exciting; most of us prefer the safety that comes with being able to flip a switch and have light to see […]
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs. These are...
This is a response to the Rust call for blogs 2021 and also a followup to last year’s entry. It will be entirely focused on GUI.
Compare coding style, bundle size and performance of 61 different ways to make a Web Component.
I've been using zig for ~4 months worth of side projects, including a toy text editor and an interpreter for a relational language . I've written ~10kloc.
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
A recent tweet by a friend of mine noted how the public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have plateaued or waned, which matches my feeling of the latest trends and zeitgeist. This blog post will go into why I think that has happened, where Scala stands now, and what the future holds for the Scala…
What does matrix multiplication mean? Here's a few common intuitions: This is useful when first learning about vectors: vectors go in, new ones come out.…
In the world of High-Frequency Trading, automated applications process hundreds of millions of market signals every day and send back…
Rotate a cube by 90 degrees around the \(x\)-axis, then rotate it by 90 degrees around the \(z\)-axis. This is equivalent to a single rotation. What is the axis and angle of this single rotation?
Collapse OS' first incarnation was written in Z80 assembler. One of the first feedbacks I had after it went viral was "why not Forth?". I briefly looked at it and it didn't seem such a great choice at first, so I first dismissed it. Then, I had what alcoholics refer to as a "Moment of clarity".
Today we’re introducing Pebble, a RocksDB-inspired and RocksDB compatible key-value store written in Go that brings greater stability to CockroachDB.
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
Part of a 3 part series. Followups on F#, Rust I built the first demo of Dark in Python, in about two weeks. A few months later when I started productizing it, I rebuilt it in OCaml. Back in 2017, when I was considering the language and platform to use
Announcing LAMBDA: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions
The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.
Ed25519 signature validation criteria vary widely between implementations, creating risks for consensus systems. Here's why and how to fix it.
A few weeks back, I was at XDC and gave a talk about various current and past input stack developments (well, a subset thereof anyway). On...
Typometer is a tool to measure and analyze visual latency of text / code editors.
Emacs User Survey 2020 Results
