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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 108 posts.
URL Rewriting for Beginners
A beginner's guide to URL rewriting, with plenty of examples.
PEP 3113 – Removal of Tuple Parameter Unpacking
Tuple parameter unpacking is the use of a tuple as a parameter in a function signature so as to have a sequence argument automatically unpacked. An example is:
Basic MySQL Performance Tuning Practices that Everyone Should Know About
In this post I'll cover a lecture on MySQL performance tuning. This lecture is given by Jay Pipes. Jay works at MySQL and has written a book on MySQL. It's called Pro MySQL and it covers intermediate and advanced features of the database. He also has an interesting blog, which I am long subscribed to - Jay Pipes blog.
Follow Hacker News from the Console
Here is something neat that I hacked together – a `top' like Python program called Hacker Top that allows you to follow Hacker News from a UNIX terminal! Hacker News has become the 2nd source for news after programming.reddit for me. I have a couple of ideas for a startup myself and the tips I get from Hacker News...
Google Protocol Buffers - Open Sourced
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don't End URLs in .0
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
JQuery 1.2.6: Events 100% faster
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
Python + Hadoop = Dumbo
As a research intern here at Last.fm, dealing with huge datasets has become my daily bread. Having a herd of yellow elephants at my disposal makes this a lot easier, but the conventional way of writing Hadoop programs can be rather cumbersome. It generally involves lots of typing, compiling, building, and moving files…
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
Wanna learn JavaScript? Here are 15 video lectures (with key ideas written out)
I decided I wanted to get better at JavaScript. I've been programming in it for a while but I never really developed any good skills in it. I was just mostly copy pasting examples together and adjusting code to get it working. I recently found a bunch of really good programming video lectures on JavaScript and…
Processing ported to JavaScript
As a sort-of reverse birthday present I’ve decided to release one of my largest projects, in recent memory. This is the project that I’ve been alluding to for quite some time now :
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
SICP - summary of 10 months working through the entire book
I've completed the SICP reading project, which I began on June 19th, 2007 . In hindsight, it seems like a very long time (almost a year!), during which this was my main hacking project at home. So, in this conclusion I want to examine my progress, and compare the result with my initial goals.
PEP 3104 – Access to Names in Outer Scopes
In most languages that support nested scopes, code can refer to or rebind (assign to) any name in the nearest enclosing scope. Currently, Python code can refer to a name in any enclosing scope, but it can only rebind names in two scopes: the local scope...