The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
Just hearing the word CMake is typically enough to make a shiver run down my spine. I’ve been deep in the muck of its behavior and tooling the last few weeks as I finish up a CMake library titled IXM. While the various minutiae of how IXM works, why I wrote it, and all the nice little usage details are definitely for…
For some time Elfeed was experiencing a strange, spurious failure. Every so often users were seeing an error (spoiler warning) when updating feeds: “error in process sentinel: Search failed.” If you use Elfeed, you might have even seen this yourself. From the surface it appeared that curl, tasked with the…
Physicist Lev Landau used to play a mental game with Soviet license plates [1]. The plates had the form of two digits, a dash, two more digits, and some letters. Rules of the game His game was to apply high school math operators to the numbers on both side of the dash so that the
An in-depth description of the React programming model.
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn't belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can't place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear…
The Cargo team have been thinking about and discussing long-term plans for Cargo. In this post I'll talk about what we hope Cargo will look like around the time of the next edition (assuming there is another edition and that it happens in about three years, neither of which is
The search for useful tiny apps is hard, but progressive web apps and the growing api surface on the web platform are starting to fill the gap.
How do you debug an application, library or an entire system with multiple processes? One answer: tracing. An introduction into bpftrace, and an overview of the Linux tracing ecosystem (DTrace, eBPF, uprobes, etc).
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
Chrome 72 for Android shipped the long-awaited Trusted Web Activity feature, which means we can now distribute PWAs in the Google Play…
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
Tim Rocktäschel — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Recursive; Professor of AI at UCL. Artificial General Intelligence, Open-Endedness, and Recursive Self-Improvement.
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
A passionate engineering student who writes about Unix related topics and tech stuff.
When making a start in a new field it is common to feel overwhelmed. You may lack confidence or feel as though you are not good enough or that you are lacking some prerequisite. You will explore these issues in this post and learn that such feelings can lead to actions that can consume a […]
I. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each l…
This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Secure Account Management Fundamentals" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/secure-account-management-fundamentals] Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities to think again about how a secure password reset function should operate, firstly whilst building this…
Update: Due to lack of interest/use, in June 2021 this site was shut down and user data (emails, names, search alerts) deleted from all systems and backups. For Extramaze LLC I'm using Racket in a commercial project -- a search engine with email alerts fo...
This is a story about how I lost my data when trying to prevent it by backing it up.
Suppose you’re a savvy C++ developer who knows all about data-oriented design and the importance of optimizing for cache locality if you want a prayer of running fast on modern hardware. Now suppose you want to go beyond basics—”just use std::vector ” is a good starting point, but you want more!
