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Beautiful Code
O’Reilly just published Beautiful Code. I was invited to contribute, but I just could not go along with the premise. I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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The Building Blocks of Ruby
When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1099305/why-is-ruby-more-suitable-for-rails-than-python/1099367] ), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby's "powerful block syntax". Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses "powerful block…
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Continuous Integration
Every developer integrates their work into mainline at least every day.
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Steve Yegge's predictions from 2004
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
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Don’t Hash Secrets
Building secure systems is difficult. It would be nice if we had a bunch of well-designed crypto building blocks that we could assemble in all sorts of ways and be certain that they would, no matte…
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C++: A language for next generation web apps
On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at <a href="http://devwaterloo.pbworks.com/">Waterloo Devhouse</a>, hosted in <a href="http://postrank.com">Postrank's</a> magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can…
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In praise of git’s index
I still run into people lambasting Git for the concept of the index from time to time. It seems strange and superfluous to users of other VCS s – like a speed bump that serves no purpose. Why not just commit the changes in the working copy? This perception is understandable; when I first heard of Git, back as a…
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The "Soft Maximum" function
The soft maximum approximates the maximum function, and approaches it in the limit, but is easier to work with.
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Presentation on the new Python GIL
08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009 09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009 11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009 12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010 01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010 02/01/2010 - 03/01/2010 04/01/2010 - 05/01/2010
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Why I prefer no tabs in source code
I notice several people have been referred to this page from http://derkarl.org/why_to_tabs.html , which tries to counter my arguments against tabs. (I also notice that the author rather ungracefully failed to inform me of the page's existence, thereby conveniently not giving me a chance to respond. Kind of makes his…
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No Comment
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Using Fibonacci Numbers to Convert from Miles to Kilometers and Vice Versa
I recently learned an interesting fact about Fibonacci numbers while watching a random number theory video on YouTube. Fibonacci numbers can be used to approximately convert from miles to kilometers and back. Here is how. Take two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, for example 5 and 8. And you're done converting. No...
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
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Understanding delete in Javascript
How the delete operator really works: property attributes, DontDelete, undeclared assignments, Gecko and IE bugs, and what ES5 strict mode changes.
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How Do You Look When Merging Fails
There was a Simpsons episode, I can’t recall correctly, but I think Bart recorded Lisa when her heart broke and he watched it in slow motion to stop exactly at that point. I thought of this e…
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Doing It Wrong
Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It’s time to stop the madness.
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The Python GIL Visualized
In preparation for my upcoming PyCON'2010 talk on "Understanding the Python GIL", I've been working on a variety of new material--including some graphical visualization of the GIL behavior described in my earlier talk . I'm still experimenting, but check it out.
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Bup 0.01: It backs things up
I just spent a few days of my Christmas vacation writing a new program, bup. bup is a program that backs things up. It's short for "backup...
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