New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
Don't use assembly unless you're an expert
…unless you're an expert at assembly, that is. The title of this post was obviously meant to be an attention-grabber, but it is much truer t...
Why Don’t We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor?
We have excellent tools to create and edit text (vim, emacs, sublime, etc.). We have pretty good tools to create and edit tabular data (excel, other spreadsheet software). We even have pretty good …
You Got Your Web Browser in my Compiler
I recently discovered that Microsoft’s VC++ compiler loads mshtml.dll – also known as Internet Explorer. The compiler does this whenever the /analyze option (requesting static code analysis) is use…
Chicken Scheme internals: the garbage collector
Hi, I'm Peter Bex, a Scheme and free software enthusiast from the Netherlands. See my user page on the CHICKEN wiki or my git server for some of my projects.
Class Hierarchies? Don't Do That
In theory , JavaScript does not have classes. In practice , the following snippet of code is widely considered to be an example of a “class” in JavaScript:
Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer
CoffeeScript is an open source project that provides a new syntax for JavaScript. I have to say that I have a lot of respect for CoffeeScript and it got a lot of things right. The “golden rule” of CoffeeScript is “It’s just JavaScript” . That means there is a straightforward equivalent to every line of CoffeeScript…
Git Source Code Review
Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams ( linux kernel , id Software , Epic Unreal ) to single individual ( Prince of Persia , Another world , Rick Dangerous ), many have adopted it as…
Toward a better programming
When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…
“The Mill” – It just might Work
The Mill is a new general-purpose high-performance processor design from out-of-the-box computing ( http://ootbcomp.com/ ). They claim to beat typical high-end out-of-order (OOO) designs like the Intel Haswell generation by crazy factors, such as being 2.3x faster while using 2.3x less power compared to a Haswell. All…
ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
ASCII delimited text solves the problems exporting and importing structured text files and is part of the design of the character set. Unfortunately a lot of people and systems use CSV and other pr…
Mozilla's low-overhead open source replay debugger
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Game Programming Patterns – Bytecode
Give behavior the flexibility of data by encoding it as instructions for a virtual machine.
Introductions to advanced Haskell topics
Tour of watershed posts and papers for Haskell
Why I like Java
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
PostgreSQL: Jsonb has committed
Great news: PostgreSQL introduced jsonb support, which is real data type with binary storage and indexing ! This work is a confluence of two projects - our hstore and json, which were existed in PostgreSQL for years in somewhat incomplete forms - hstore (10 years old!) implements key-value storage…
Editing binaries: easier than it sounds
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two models of the…
How to design an elliptic-curve signature system
Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news . The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by…
JDK8 + Facebook React: Rendering single page apps on the server
A post by August Lilleaas, published March 20, 2014.
2048 Numberwang
Join the numbers and get Numberwang! Careful: this game is extremely addictive!
Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that