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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,905 posts.
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Signs that you are a bad programmer
Reasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path (“running the program in your head”) while knowing what the goal of the code is.
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How to turn a biased coin into a Fair Coin
Fair Coins are the currency of Userland. A Fair Coin flips fifty-fifty with mathematical exactness. In the real world most coins are pretty fair, but you never know whether there might be a small bias to one side or another. This presents Lauren Ipsum , a girl who's lost in Userland, with a problem. No one wants her…
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Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps
In the beginning, there was the web and you accessed it though the browser and all was good. Stuff didn’t download until you clicked on something; you expected cookies to be tracking you and you always knew if HTTPS was being used. In general, the casual observer had a
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Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years
I recently compiled a list of Perlis Languages that were meant to illustrate varying paradigms not typically found in mainstream programming languages. Those languages were meant to stretch your mind and are not necessarily representative of the state of the art in language design and implementation. In this post I…
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24 year old student lights match: Europe versus Facebook
If you are interested in social networks, don't miss the slick video about Max Schrems’ David and Goliath struggle with Facebook over the way they are treating his personal information. Click on the red “CC” in the lower right-hand corner to see the English subtitles.
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(An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
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Why Not Haskell?
Why I haven't been writing much Haskell code lately.
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Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone
The iPad browsing interface has been completely redesigned to feel more at home in the iPad environment. Instead of just being a blown-up full-screen list, it’s now a more touch-friendly grid, with all navigation available in any orientation:
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In defence of Objective-C
Chris Hulbert, Splinter Software, is a contracting iOS developer based in Australia.
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Thoughts on porting NumPy to PyPy
Last weekend, I attended GitHub's PyCodeConf in Miami Florida and had the opportunity to give a talk on array-oriented computing and Python....
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Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released
The C64 conversion of Prince of Persia, based on the original Apple II code by Jordan Mechner has been released today. It requires a Commod...
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Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to…
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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How I retired in 9 years on a corporate programmer salary
I have been asked many times to provide some more gritty details on how I became Mr. Money Mustache at such an early age. Commenters and email writers have asked me to provide Salaries and Savings …
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There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe
I recently worked on the update to the ASP.NET site, now in beta at ...
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Quake's Fast Inverse Square Root
I'm no graphics expert, but appreciate why square roots are useful. The Pythagorean theorem computes distance between points, and dividing by distance helps…
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A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck . A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place.
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