10891
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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Files Are Hard
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
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Philosophy of science books every computer scientist should read
When I tell my fellow computer scientists or software developers that I'm interested in philosophy of science, they first look a bit confused, then we have a really interesting discussion about it and then they ask me for some interesting books they could read about it. So, I thought I should turn my answer into a…
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems
For quite some time now I’ve been trying to learn about distributed systems, and it’s appropriate to say that once you start digging, there seems to be no end to it, the rabbit hole goes on and on. The literature in distributed systems is quite extensive, with lots of papers coming from different universities, plus…
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I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
Take a walk with Stephen Wolfram through the topics in his new book that introduces non-programmers to the Wolfram Language and computational thinking.
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The convergence of compilers, build systems and package managers
Abstract. The traditional abstraction barriers between compiler, build system and package manager are increasingly ill-suited for IDEs, parallel build systems, and modern source code organization. Recent compilers like go and rustc are equipped with a fully-fledged build systems; semantic build systems like Bazel and…
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A magic getopt
Enter magic getopt . Via a little bit of macro magic, the above options-handling code turns into this:
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Why I'm Excited About Native CSS Variables
A few weeks ago CSS variables—more accurately known as CSS Custom Properties—shipped in Chrome Canary behind the Experimental Web Platform Features flag.[1] When Chrome engineer Addy Osmani first tweeted about the release, he was met with a surprising amount of negativity, hostility, and skepticism. At least, it was…
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Avoiding Reflection (And Such) in Go
So, as previous posts show , I like Go well enough. But as a computer-language polyglot, "Go programmer" is not part of my identity, and I try for a balanced view. It is very human to go overboard in both praise and criticism, both easy to find online.
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Unexplored Areas in Data Compression
A good colleague of mine, Rich Geldreich put up a interesting article talking about his viewpoints in future directions in lossless…
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Learn to Code, It's Harder Than You Think
TL;DR: All the evidence shows that programming requires a high level of aptitude that only a small percentage of the population possess. The...
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What Holds Me Back from ClojureScript
Thoughts about programming, mostly
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GC and Rust Part 1: Specifying the Problem
This is the first in a series of posts will discuss why garbage collection is hard, especially for Rust, and brainstorm about solutions to the …
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A bad citizen in Javaland (2006)
You are born with no body parts. One by one, your organs are pushed into you. Should anyone attempt to interact with you before your organs have finished arriving you will die. Luckily this doesn&#…
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Self hosted C – breakdown
I did it. It wasn't easy, but I did it. My C Compiler can compile itself. Even though it still has holes in functionality and obvious bug...
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Python List Comprehensions Explained Visually
Sometimes a programming design pattern becomes common enough to warrant its own special syntax. Python’s list comprehensions are a prime example...
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Perl 6 is fun
This post got a lot of discussion on Hacker News that you might find interesting. I’ve been writing a fair bit of Perl 6 lately, and my main takeaway so far is that Perl 6 is fun. Pretty much everything I love in Perl 5 is still part of Perl 6, but almost everything I hate is gone too. $Love - $Hate = $Fun; Here are…
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Pattern: Back ends for front ends
With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …
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Creating standalone Mac OS X applications with Python and py2app
In this tutorial we’ll be using py2app to create a standalone OSX application from a Python 2 or 3 source code with a simple Tkinter user interface. "py2app is a Python setuptools command which will allow you to make standalone application bundles and plugins from Python scripts. py2app is similar in purpose and…
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UUIDs generally do not meet security requirements
Some time ago, I was doing a web application penetration test, and noticed that the authentication tokens were UUIDs. This I knew was risky, and in fact if you read the UUID rfc, section 6 of it wa…
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My bank has an API so I built online banking
I recently attended Mondo’s second Hackathon, and it was incredibly insightful. My first hackathon, and moreover, my first time working…
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Test-Driven Development is Stupid
Blog of Agatha Mallett: A post in which I provocatively argue that test-driven design results in worse code. I cite real-world examples, discuss why these failures occur, and suggest alternatives.