The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,543 posts.
Update 01/07/19 Greetings from 2019! The good news is that Chicago isn’t yet a radioactive crater. The bad news is almost everything I said about refinement in this article is wrong. I’m working on writing a more in-depth, rigorous treatment of refinement as its own article. But this one is currently explaining…
I wrote my Advent of Code in D. The programming language. It was the first time I used D in earnest every day for something substantial. It was fun and I learned things along the way, such as easy metaprogramming, concurrency I could write correctly, and functional programming that doesn’t feel like I have one arm…
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
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…
You have heard of “zip bombs” (a tiny ZIP file that decompresses to multiple gigabytes) and “XML bombs” (small XML file abusing the entities to consume lots of memory), and …
In this article I give a brief tour of a program analysis technique called symbolic execution. As the title indicates, I aim to explain both the intuition behind the technique, and also the details of a simple implementation. My intended audience is professional programmers who have no background in program analysis.
I developed an application to display and control Android devices connected on USB. It does not require any root access. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
TL;DR: Many badges were broken since they were using the shuttered pypip.in site. I wrote a bot that could fix these and automatically submit pull requests with the changes. And then I had my GitHub account suspended. Do not make automatic unsolicited pull requests. Disclaimer This post discusses the design...
Musings on navigating the tech bubble with philosophy and self-improvement.
Created this by pasting together a few screenshots from a NetBeans profiler session – of a Spring + Hibernate web-app running within JBoss. Quite interesting to see how the business logic is …
On this page I present a robust, custom build system for a software project written in C, in less than 500 lines of Python code. I think it is about as minimal as a practical dependency-tracking build system can get. Although it adds to the code that must be maintained as part of the project, I think that having a…
If you want to make a sound shorter, you can play it faster. Doing this also makes it higher pitch unfortunately. If you want to make a sound longer, you can play it more slowly. This also makes it…
Context A few years after I created the Elastic Binary Trees (ebtree) , I started to get some feedback from users who needed to use the...
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!!
While in the middle of writing “Reading bits in far too many ways, part 3”, I realized that I had written a lot of background material that had absolutely nothing to do with bit I/O and…
How to script in any language thanks to rootless containers and BINFMT_MISC.
Having benefited from “var” for many years when writing c#, I’m delighted that Java is at last getting support for local variable type inference in JDK 10. From JDK 10 instead of saying ArrayList<String> foo = new ArrayList<String>(); we can say var foo = new ArrayList<String>(); and the type of “foo” is inferred as…
Laziness is often useful. It allows you to express “infinite” computations, and only pay for as much of the computation as you need.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I love to program "by hand." I happen to practice a degree of ascetical programming practices, and I believe that they help me to more deeply internalize and understand problems, ultimately delivering higher quality solutions. One of
Typical Age DE forum post: The pathfinding in the game is terrible. First off, Age of Empires Definitive Edition is a remaster of...
A few years ago I started to work on an MPEG1 Video decoder, completely written in JavaScript. Now, I finally found the time to clean up the library, improve its performance, make it more error resilient and modular and add an MP2 Audio decoder and MPEG-TS demuxer. This makes this library not just an MPEG decoder, but…
The goal of the numpy exercises is to serve as a reference as well as to get you to apply numpy beyond the basics. The questions are of 4 levels of difficulties with L1 being the easiest to L4 being the hardest.
