Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 196 posts.
I don’t know about you, but nothing gets me going in the morning quite like a good old fashioned programming language rant. It stirs the blood to see someone skewer one of those “blub” languages the plebians use, muddling through their day with it between furtive visits to StackOverflow.
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
Perhaps you've read posts like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods programmers believe about time . Maybe you've also read Falsehoods programmers believe about geography .
PEP 3107 introduced syntax for function annotations, but the semantics were deliberately left undefined. There has now been enough 3rd party usage for static type analysis that the community would benefit from a standard vocabulary and baseline tools w...
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
As I mentioned in my previous post , my Mastering Regular Expressions book was just reviewed on Slashdot . One thing that struck me in reading all the resulting comments was the (several different copies of an) apparently famous quote that goes something like:
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
Idioms and patterns for handling errors in Go.
Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
You’ll find your components much easier to reuse and reason about if you divide them into two categories.
Flipboard launched during the dawn of the smartphone and tablet as a mobile-first experience, allowing us to rethink content layout principles from the web for a more elegant user experience on a variety of touchscreen form factors.
To quote the last part of this blog post, "I think it's [asyncio] really well done, it's fun to use, and I still am interested in having more of a SQLAlchemy story for it, because I'm sure folks will still want this no matter what anyone says.". To that end, SQLAlchemy 1.4 now includes complete support for asyncio …
How to run docker containers on your desktop.
“The Implementation of Functional Languages” is a book about implementing functional programming languages using lazy graph reduction, and it divides into three parts. The first part describes how to translate a high-level functional language into an intermediate language, called the lambda calculus, incuding detailed…
It turns out that finite state machines are useful for things other than expressing computation. Finite state machines can also be used to compactly represent ordered sets or maps of strings that can be searched very quickly.
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen
rwasa is our full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx . It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years' experience with high volume web environments. In addition to…
Python supports multiple ways to format text strings. These include %-formatting 1, str.format() 2, and string.Template 3. Each of these methods have their advantages, but in addition have disadvantages that make them cumbersome to use in practice. This...
<p>Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits,...
(This post is an aspirational transcript of the talk I gave to the Data Terra Nemo conference in May 2015. If you’d like to watch the less eloquent version of the same talk that I actually gave, the video should be available soon!)
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