The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
The command line tool I created Sloc Cloc and Code (scc) (which is now modified and maintained by many other excellent people) counts lines of code, comments and makes a complexity estimate for files …
Does this Go snippet compile, and if not, why?
This resource lists a bunch of stories which in some way, explore the beautiful ideas behind computer science, software engineering and even plain old programming.
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
A general OpenStreetMap editing workflow, with the example of Mapping the village of Marmari, Evia in Greece (Μαρμάρι, Εύβοια).
Engineers build stuff. They need to put together complex systems, most often from pieces that others have built. I jokingly talk to my colleagues that software engineering is similar to plumbing - take various pieces of software and link them through an interface (API or in case of real plumbing - connectors,
Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it’s manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has fallen out of favor, with many preferring more time-tested models like enterprise SaaS and biotech.Peloton yesterday…
Keybase’s iOS client has received a backdoor. It seems that Stellar, the extremely well-funded and well-marketed cryptocurrency, has struck a deal with Keybase…
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
In a previous post I outlined why programmers should strive to be good at one thing rather than everything. In this post I discuss how to ...
I’m in the middle of three multi-month to a year projects right now: Writing a book Running a marathon Building a ...
George Barlow initially set out to develop a controller to be able to call up a voice preset, and then tweak from there. What he's done is essentially transformed the DX7 synth into an interactive sound designer's dream machine.
Two days at PDX DevOpsDays, a gathering of system administrators who use version control, and write a lot of YAML.
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entiti…
There's a wave of companies trying to find new ways to make software for work, building bundles of workflows and networks that capture the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls of some industry or profession and turn them into structure, automation and time.
Serving the right code to the right browsers can be tricky. Here are some options.
In part 1 of this series, we built a Sudoku solver based on translating Sudoku to SAT and then giving the resulting SAT instance to a SAT solver. We also benchmarked our solver and found out that it, unsurprisingly, loses to the state of the art of Sudoku solvers. Since
If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a fascinating episode in history. Neville Chamberlain’s first plane ride was a trip to meet Adolf Hitler. The British Prime Minister was taken by Hitler’s charisma. He believed the German leader when he promised not to invade Czechoslovakia. After his triumphant return from Germany…
Earlier this month, employees at more than 1,000 companies saw one or two paycheck’s worth of funds deducted from their bank accounts after the CEO of their cloud payroll provider absconded with $35 million in payroll and tax deposits from customers . On Monday, the CEO was arrested and allegedly confessed that the…
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
