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“Peer review” is younger than we think
This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer review, a...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
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Testing FIDO U2F security keys
Last time I reviewed various security keys at a fairly superficial level: basic function, physical characteristics etc. This post considers lower-level behaviour.
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Tensorflow sucks
A detailed analysis
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Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances
Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances using Docker on an external volume
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No Bitcoin-based protocol can handle more than 20M users per month
To solve Bitcoin’s scalability challenge, many so-called layer 2 protocols have been proposed. All of these protocols operate on the same, relatively simple, principle:
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
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Thoughts on Microsoft's Time-Travel Debugger
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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A Simple Approach to Building a Real-Time Collaborative Text Editor
This post is my attempt to write an easy to understand introduction to the main ideas behind building a real-time col...
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A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder
This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. You can find the source code here along with a test suite and benchmark:
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The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November
[UPDATE: This post was originally said that the SegWit2X fork will happen on November 1. In fact it is scheduled to occur on block 494,764 ...
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Why many developers still prefer Objective-C to Swift
Lack of ABI stability, slow compile times, poor Xcode support, and more hold Swift back
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Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
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Joining Google to better explain search
When I retired from search journalism in June, I had no idea what I would be doing next. I just knew I was ready for a break and something different from what I had been doing for so long. That something different has arrived: I’m joining Google as of Monday.
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The License Zero Manifesto
sustainable software in the open
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Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets
A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for…
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Building on Rock, Not Sand
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter …
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Sieve of Eratosthenes in Python (2015)
Sieve of Eratosthenes animation Source: Wikipedia[0] One of the things we need to do when finding Perrin Pseudo-Primes is to recognise prime numbers so we can see if the numbers predicted by the Perrin test to be prime, are. So we need to generate primes. For small primes (for some definition of "small") this can be…
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How To Legally Own Another Person
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
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Building and using a 29-year-old compiler on a modern system
In this post I’ll share my experience of building and using one of the earliest versions of the GNU C Compiler — GCC 1.27 (released in 1988) on a modern system.
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
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Useful GCC warning options not enabled by -Wall -Wextra
Note: This blog post was written for GCC 7. Later versions of the compiler may have added some of these warnings to -Wall or -Wextra . ...
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Scrolling your website past the iPhone X’s notch
During the introduction of the iPhone X a hilarious gif made the Twitter rounds, showing a list scrolling past the new notch.
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Are Jump Tables Always Fastest?
tl;dr: I make a petty point about premature optimization; don't go out and rewrite your switch statements as binary searches by hand; maybe do rewrite your jump tables as switch statements, though.