The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,543 posts.
There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
We'll get to the shrinking, but first let's motivate the binary in question. Three years ago I wrote the "Surfacing Hidden Change to Pull Requests" post which covered pushing important stats and diffs into PRs as a comment. This avoids surprises with changes that affect binary size, manifests, and dependency trees.
Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it— maple cocaine (@maplecocaine) January 3, 2019 Yesterday the main character of...
On July 31st , Canada’s COVID Alert app was made available for general use, though it does not have support for actually reporting a diagnosis in most provinces, yet.
If the text is neatly neatly isolated inside an HTML element, it’s easy; this will do:
Writing two flash drivers starting from an abstraction.
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.
Python can execute code. Make sure it executes only the code you want it to.
While I was there, I thought a lot about tools – mechanical tools, software tools, tools that last, and tools that are fragile. The somber snow-covered scenery made me think about how quickly most of the tools we use today get outdated or replaced, and I thought about the kinds of tools that I’ve been building for…
The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the…
F is a pure functional concatenative language originally designed as an extension of False . F contains the list-operations of K3 and the dip combinator of Joy . Floating-point and symbolic datatypes are supported. One-time assignment is enforced in syntax. A theory of function-valence and -charge is outlined. F also…
Unless you live under one of the few rocks that still lack Internet access, you’ve probably already heard of an “event queue” . If not, maybe “message queue”, or “event loop”, or “message pump” rings a bell. To refresh your memory, let’s walk through a couple of common manifestations of the pattern.
Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to work out how I want to store my game configuration. At first I started playing with XML, which was nice because I could stream a file rather than loading the entire thing into memory but I turned away from XML because …
Programming, retrogaming, hacking and computer stuff.
In 2012, Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X (now macOS). When you try to run Mac software downloaded from the internet, Gatekeeper checks whether the software was signed with a valid Developer ID certificate. If not, then Gatekeeper refuses to run the software. Over the years, Gatekeeper has become more strict…
The “official” Python Docker image is useful, but to actually understand why, and to use it correctly, it’s worth understanding how exactly it’s constructed.
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with inventing a visual writing system for lambda calculus.
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
Most WebAssembly tutorials and examples you will find online focus on using it inside the browser in order to accelerate various functionality of a website or web app. However, there is an area where WebAssembly is really powerful but not talked too much about: outside the browser usage scenarios. That is what we’ll…
This is a quick writeup of a steganographic tool that I threw together: steg86 . It uses a quirk of the x86 instruction encoding format to hide messages in pre-existing binaries with no size or performance overhead.
The sole purpose of this blog is to host a single article..
I’ve noticed changes in how I prefer to develop software since I’ve been focusing my career on Elixir. It allows me to think bigger thoughts and to develop with lower friction and less fear. I don’t want to go back.
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
EDIT 2022-07-22: With the shutdown (or imminent shutdown) of the 2G/EDGE/3G network in the US I'm now switching to a BlackBerry Q10, which supports LTE and is able to run ConnectBot.
Kenneth Iverson’s 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. He provided a number of examples ranging across linear algebra, arithmetic, probability, and logic. Unfortunately, most…
