The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
A case study of how Elixir is being used at X-Plane.
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
My list of “Probably Are Gonna Need It” security features for your web app – things that you should build up-front, not wait until you need them (when it’s already too late).
m4 is a macro processor, in the sense that it copies its input to the output, expanding macros as it goes
In this article, the author shares six command-line tools that can enhance productivity for programmers. These tools include `broot` for navigating...
Co-authored with Dr Paidi O’Raghallaigh and Dr Stephen McCarthy at Cork University Business School as part of my PhD studies, and originally published by Cutter Consortium’s Business Agility …
The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first bad commit. At each step, you say either git bisect …
In this blog post, we take a look at the Elixir programming language from the engineer/business perspective.
The creators of Meow hash made security claims; we break them all.
With Postgres, you don't need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution. If you haven't yet given Postgres' built-in full-text search a try, read on for a simple intro.
Today we’re talking about ALF. It’s a surprising move for Nicole Express; we do not condone cat-eating. But neither did Alf, eventually. In any case, we’re n...
I have to admit, my research blog posts are getting longer and longer. From one side I find it genuinely encouraging, because if one gets so much information just by scratching the topic, imagine what’s hidden beneath the surface! One university professor once said “what could be interesting in databases?”, and it…
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in Windows Task Manager ena…
So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally. That’s all-a...
Without psychological safety, respect, and trust, none of the following is possible. The way we work, the work we do, and the organizations within which we work are all part of a connected system. You cannot change anything without changing everything. You cannot improve a system by tinkering with the parts. Process…
Every software team says they do Agile and yet almost nobody is Agile. How did we get to this point? Where do we go from here?
The other week, I stumbled on the post Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute , which was a funny coincidence, as I was just in...
A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets. This started out as a feature request from Aslak Raanes: #1388: Serve using UNIX …
Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code…
GitHub’s supply chain security features are now available for Go modules, which will help the Go community discover, report & prevent vulnerabilities.
Further adventures in JavaScript
Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
