New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
2016
310

How to speed up the Rust compiler

Rust is a great language, and Mozilla plans to use it extensively in Firefox. However, the Rust compiler (rustc) is quite slow and compile times are a pain point for many Rust users. Recently I’ve been working on improving that. This post covers how I’ve done this, and should be of interest to anybody else who wants…

311

Taking PHP Seriously

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…

312

Static types in Python

Over the last few years, static type checkers have become available for popular dynamic languages like PHP (Hack) and JavaScript (Flow and TypeScript), and have seen wide adoption. Two years ago, a provisional syntax for static type annotations was added to Python 3. However, static types in Python …

313

Differentiable Neural Computers

In a recent study in Nature, we introduce a form of memory-augmented neural network called a differentiable neural computer, and show that it can learn to use its memory to answer questions about complex, structured data, including artificially generated stories, family trees, and even a map of the London Underground…

319

Poll on macOS 10.12 is broken

When Mac OS X first launched they did so without an existing poll function. They later added poll() in Mac OS X 10.3, but we quickly discovered that it was broken (it returned a non-zero value when asked to wait for nothing) so in the curl project we added a check in configure for that … Continue reading poll on mac…