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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
2019
605

PHP 5 and 7.0 end of life

Critical PHP Security Release 21 Oct 2026: PHP released emergency patches on 21 October 2026 for two critical unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) Learn why PHP EOL matters, the security & compliance risks of running unsupported PHP, and how to plan, test, and upgrade to supported versions.

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Think in Math, Write in Code

Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…

611

Notes on a Smaller Rust

Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…

617

Let's Build a Compiler

Compilers, interpreters, runtimes, and the like can sometimes feel vaguely magical. They take your code, perform complex transformations that you only partially understand, and spit out an executable binary. Clearly, the inner workings of such a beast must contain arcane secrets, not meant for the minds of mortals.

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Open-Sourcing Inform 7

This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2019 , held at MIT, Boston, on 14-16 June 2019. It's a sequel to a talk given in London a year earlier , when I went into "literate programming" at greater depth, but when the design of Inter was more embryonic. I'd like to thank the Narrascope organisers for fitting me in to…