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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 679 posts.
Advice From An Old Programmer
You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.
Engineering hints you'll rarely hear
Explore the latest technologies and innovations on the architecture engineered for agility
Pdf.js: Rendering PDF with HTML5 and JavaScript
Update: I updated the links again. pdf.js has moved to a new location on github. Why? While traveling to the Firefox 4 launch parties in Seoul and Taipei all the way from California, we killed a lo…
ORM is an anti-pattern
ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.
Fantastic summary of some of the math pertinent to theoretical computer science.
This web page is a revised and extended version of Appendix A from the book Conceptual Structures by John F. Sowa. It presents a brief summary of the following topics for students and general readers of that book and related books such as Knowledge Representation and books on logic, linguistics, and computer science.
The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist
How a computer scientist, a programmer and a developer differ in skills, focus and priorities, even though the terms are often used interchangeably.
A possible flaw in open-source bcrypt implementations
[NOTE: See updates below and here .] I'm working on an application that requires a secure password hash. The state of the art is Colin Perc...
What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?
Yesterday, there was a blog post entitled "What the Hell is Happening to Rails" that stayed at the number one spot on Hacker News for quite a while. The post and many (but not most) the comments on the post reflect deep-seated concern about the recent direction of Rails.
WTH is happening to Rails? I'll tell you.
I just read the blog post that got some traction on HN last night, entitled “ What the hell is happening to rails? ” It goes on to list a litany of complaints against changes in Rails 3.x, ranging from the default commenting of the catch-all route to, yes, of course, CoffeeScript. They all end up sounding a lot like…
Why developers should be force-fed state machines
This post is meant to create more awareness about state machines in the web application developer crowd. If you don’t know what state machines are, please read up on them first. Wikipedia is a good place to start, as always. State machines are awesome The main reason for using state machines is to help the design…
Aha Moments When Learning Git
Git is a fast, flexible but challenging distributed version control system. Before jumping in: Along with a book, tutorial and cheatsheet, here are the…
How to become a proficient Python programmer
Update: This is a re-post of an older blog post of mine. Originally it was posted on my personal blog where it has >30 comments and >20’000 views over the last years. I’m deprecating my personal blog in favor of this 200OK blog.
Things that amuse me
I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…
Don't Forget Your Logged Out Users
I find myself saying this quite often these days to entrepreneurs and their product teams. It's something that I've noticed working with leading social platforms like Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. Services such as these have a large number of their users accessing the service regularly on a logged out basis. I…
Coding tricks I learnt at Apple
When I worked at the Apple Online Store , we would never load test the live website. There was rarely a need. However, it was always an inte...
Low-Competition Niches In Retail Software
This is a guest post by Joannes Vermorel, founder of the Lokad Forecasting Service. Software developers seem to be herd animals. They like to stay very close to each other. As a result, the marketp…
Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit
You have probably all heard the following story about Jobs meeting Knuth for the first time in 1983. Steve had managed to get Don Knuth, the legendary Stanford professor of computer science, to give a lunchtime lecture to the Mac team. Knuth is the author of at least a dozen books, including the massive and somewhat...
Kay on the Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming"
Dr. Alan Kay explains when "object-oriented" was first used and what it means. []
Making a Local Web Server Public with Localtunnel
Twilio posts cloud communications trends, customer stories, and tips for building scalable voice and SMS applications with Twilio's APIs.