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Speeding up a Rails request by 150ms by changing 1 line
We’re pretty obsessed with performance at Gilt Groupe . You can get a taste for what we’re dealing with, and how we’re dealing with it, from our recent presentation at RailsConf .
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 498 posts.
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How to implement 'realistic' swordfighting in video games.
A few weeks ago, I talked about how the d20 system (You know: Hit points, damage rolls, and health potions) was great for tabletop games but terrible for video gaming. I suggested that developers would do well to come up with a new system for dealing with deadly combat rather than using the d20 system when it doesn’t…
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Clojure 1.0
After a sustained period of API stability and minimal bug reports, I'm happy to announce the release of Clojure 1.0! http://clojure.googleco...
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Clojure: It’s About the Libraries
There’s a big ‘ol thread going on down at comp.lang.lisp about Clojure vs. Common Lisp. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say that Clojure and Rich Hickey are holding their own against some of the top c.l.l. flamers.
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WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08)
New Profiling and Debugging Tools in WebKit
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JWZ, on Garbage Collection
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''
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Joe Marshall's take on Guido Van Rossum's post on tail recursion
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone engine code review
For once, developers were able to read the source code of an id software product just a few days after its release. I spent a week in my spare time reading the internal of the Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone engine. It is by far the cleanest and easiest id source code release to date. This review is far from being…
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Tail Recursion Elimination
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
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Zawinski's Law
“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…
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The Development Abstraction Layer
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
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Lord of the REPLs
While working on App Engine's new Java runtime , we realized that we were missing something important. Something the Python runtime already...
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Why is programming fun?
Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.
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PEP 289 – Generator Expressions
This PEP introduces generator expressions as a high performance, memory efficient generalization of list comprehensions PEP 202 and generators PEP 255.