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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
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Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming
I'm certainly not a world-class expert, but I have put my 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into programming. Here are 31 of my reflections on programming.
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Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)
The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van. As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…
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Emacs' org-mode gets citation support
Introducing citations!
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Leap seconds: Causing bugs even when they don’t happen
Some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can
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Full-time open source with Andrew Kelley
Today’s show: How to quit your job and work on open source full time. This story has it all -- balancing side projects and full-time employment, building up enough supports to leave your job, and explaining quitting to your family and friends. And also: what do you do if your project succeeds, and then someone forks…
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A Bestiary of Functions for Systems Designers
Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
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Beautiful ideas in programming: generators and continuations
Science, programming, books, and other interesting stuff
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How to write slow Rust code
I have recently published a blog post that, as I had expected (actually, hoped for, as that would attract people to contribute to the “study”), generated quite some polemic on the Internet!
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Extracting Objects Recursively with Jq
The Algolia-powered Hacker News API returns nested comment threads that look like this: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108
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Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things into namespaces
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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New in Git: switch and restore
To my surprise, I recently found out about 2 new additions to the list of high-level commands: git restore and git switch
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Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement realtime collaborative editing (like Google Docs). They implemented lots of algorithms - CRDTs and OT algorithms and stuff. And they benchmarked them all to see how they perform. (Cool!!) Some algorithms worked reasonably…
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The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
When M1 Macs were launched, a new GPU with iOS-like architecture started driving the external monitors. This meant that the old method for controlling monitors using DDC wouldn't work anymore. Apps like Lunar and MonitorControl had to find other ways to change the brightness of the monitors.
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strcpy: A niche function you don't need
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
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Probably Are Gonna Need It: Application Security Edition
My list of “Probably Are Gonna Need It” security features for your web app – things that you should build up-front, not wait until you need them (when it’s already too late).
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M4 as a templating language (2020)
m4 is a macro processor, in the sense that it copies its input to the output, expanding macros as it goes
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Technical debt is not debt; it’s not even technical
Co-authored with Dr Paidi O’Raghallaigh and Dr Stephen McCarthy at Cork University Business School as part of my PhD studies, and originally published by Cutter Consortium’s Business Agility …
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Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first bad commit. At each step, you say either git bisect …
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The Human Side of Elixir
In this blog post, we take a look at the Elixir programming language from the engineer/business perspective.
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Cryptanalysis of Meow Hash
The creators of Meow hash made security claims; we break them all.
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Collision Detection Is Hard: The Story of Alf
Today we’re talking about ALF. It’s a surprising move for Nicole Express; we do not condone cat-eating. But neither did Alf, eventually. In any case, we’re n...
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Evolution of tree data structures for indexing
I have to admit, my research blog posts are getting longer and longer. From one side I find it genuinely encouraging, because if one gets so much information just by scratching the topic, imagine what’s hidden beneath the surface! One university professor once said “what could be interesting in databases?”, and it…