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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 744 posts.
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What’s to love about C?
Antiquated, clunky, and unsafe. Though beloved to some, C is a language that many choose to hate. The mass opinion is indeed so negative it’s hard to believe that anybody would program anything in C. Yet they do. In fact a lot of things, even new things, are programmed in C. The standard was recently […]
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Why you should never use hash functions for message authentication
The general thrust of this post is: use a MAC function like HMAC to sign data, don’t use hash functions. Although not all hash functions suffer from the problem I’m going to illustrate, in general using a hash function for message authentication comes with a lot of potential problems because those functions aren’t…
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My experiences at a woman's programming workshop
I heard about a Python tutorial that was going on this weekend, and with well over a decade of Python experience, I decided to volunteer to help students. I hadn't realized it was a women's workshop put on by PyLadies , but I'm glad I went because I came out of the event with a number of observations that extend out…
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Doom 3 Source code review
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
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Vim: Buffers, Windows, and Tabs
If you’ve moved to Vim from an editor like Notepad++ or TextMate, you’ll be used to working with the idea of tabs in a text editor in a certain way. Specifically, a tab represents an open file; while the tab’s there, you’ve got an open file, as soon as you close it, it goes away. This one-to-one correspondence is…
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The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives
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PyPy 1.9 Released
We're pleased to announce the 1.9 release of PyPy. This release brings mostly bugfixes, performance improvements, other small improvements ...
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Storing Passwords Securely
Why "SHA 256-bits enterprise-grade password encryption" is only slightly better than storing passwords in plain text, and better ways to do it.
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PostgreSQL when it is not your job
( Note beforehand: I didn’t get everything. You really also have to look at his slides for the details. Thanks Christophe for posting the slides right afterwards !)
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Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, 2nd edition
News & blog about Learn Enough (including the Ruby on Rails Tutorial)
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New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.
Jasim's homepage
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Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres
I had a crazy thought. Don't all good ideas start with that phrase? Well, this one was suitably crazy: why not build my own version of MongoDB right on top of Postgres? It sounds a little far-fetched, but in all honesty it's pretty simple.
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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
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A Boggling Return to C
My first real programming class, back in high school, was taught in C. I found it difficult and I remember spending the whole year thinking that I really had no aptitude for programming. I think I got an OK grade in the end, but I felt like I was really struggling compared to the other students in the class. It wasn’t…
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Boolean Blindness
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
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20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time
<img src="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bandits/MAB-2.jpg"/> A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger…
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Why I Use Perl: Reliability
Perl 5 is a great language for new development because it and its ecosystem are amazingly reliable. Here's my case study.
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Stripe open-sources Einhorn
Einhorn: the language-independent shared socket manager - contribsys/einhorn