The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,535 posts.
Bézier curves are widely used for defining vector graphics. They are basically polynomial parametric curves, but given in the Bernstein basis, which enables us to define the curve using control points. The first and last control point define the start and endpoint of the curves, the intermediate control points kind of…
Dr. Brian Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who contributed to the development of UNIX at B
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks, opens all kinds of doors to career opportunities, and allows you to enter those doors earlier in life (which in turn allows you to accomplish more over the course of your career).
If you've used CSS, you know what a class name is. They're a very poor proxy for the web today. Let's stop using them.
Today I noticed via a tweet by @mitsuhiko that Mermaid Gantt diagrams are great for displaying distributed trace information like what you’d get from JaegerU...
Can I make math operations run 100x faster on really, really big numbers?
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy , but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated.
A new way to make games
In the previous two golden ages (1950s-1960s and the 1980s), our expectations outpaced the capabilities of the technology at the time, leading to disappointment. In contrast, the AI technology of the current golden age, which began in the mid-2010s, has consistently exceeded our expectations.
In a previous post, I used a simple interpreter bug to demonstrate the research skill of manually reducing test cases. This time, I show off the excellent Shrinkray reducer to see how it can automate the same process. The tricky part when using automated test-case reducers is writing an interestingness test that…
Quartz shares the high level design of a Clock interface that closely resembles the functions in the time standard library, and a "real" clock passes through to the standard library in production, while a mock clock gives precise control in testing.
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
strlcpy(3) is an OpenBSD function which is often hailed as a safer replacement for strcpy(3) and/or strncpy(3) . One of the obvious issues with strlcpy is that it's not safe if src isn't null-terminated. However, that's not the reason I don't like strlcpy. In fact despite knowing this, I used to think it was an okay…
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
I've created a set of install scripts for Windows that helps people install many different programming languages using standard tools.
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.
I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes something is ju...
An overview of the ongoing efforts to improve and roll out support for free-threaded CPython throughout the Python open source ecosystem
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You heard it right…
The JFrog Security Research team has recently discovered and reported a leaked access token with administrator access to Python’s, PyPI’s and Python Software Foundation’s GitHub repositories, which was leaked in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub. As a community service, the JFrog Security Research team…
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
Maintaining a resume is not the most interesting use of time. Naturally, when I needed to bring my own up to date, I decided to spend a great deal more time on it and overengineer the process.
I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
