The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,551 posts.
There are still many situations where it's not feasible to stop a process, attach the debugger, and start futzing with memory. We can argue over whether this is because the industry didn't learn enough from the Pharo folks later. For now, let's pretend that's axiomatic: a certain amount of debugging (and even testing)…
The Nim team is happy to announce version 1.6.6, our third patch release for Nim 1.6.
It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple techniques. The last lexer written, in Go, was very fast indeed - processing 1 MiB of source in about 20…
As a backend developer at a mobile app company, a common task was migrating a database schema.This could be to improve query performance, change column ...
Let's face it: the internet is broken. It feels like so much of the web is composed of clickbait, ads, popups, and a toxic amount of JavaScript that you need a modern computer just to get any value out of it. Remember when low-power computers were created for people who were "just browsing the internet?"…
A while ago there was an interesting thread on the Julia Discourse about the “state of machine learning in Julia”. I posted a response discussing the differences between Julia and Python (both JAX and PyTorch), and it seemed to be really well received! Since then this topic seems to keep coming up, so I thought I’d…
There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…
At my company we use a small SQLite database. We define the schema in a single file with SQL CREATE TABLE statements. If we add tables, columns, or indexes, our application will create them automatically the next time it starts up.
About 5 years ago I was working on a project written in style still common for today:
If the short answer leaves you wanting, keep reading. I must admit that this sentence from the Hare announcement may have caused some confusion:
Just over two years ago I left a role at a London based startup where I lead development of a large, React based e-commerce frontend to join Google to work on Chrome DevTools. My initial focus was to introduce Web Components as the new fundamental building block of all new DevTools features and UI. With the recently…
This is a series of brief articles aimed at teaching Emacs to computer professionals who are unfamiliar with it. I do not dwell on the basics of the user interface, which can be learned from the built-in tutorial. Instead, each article in this series will distill one very specific command line (CLI) tool or technique…
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
Racket version 8.5 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org. As of this release: Racket's new `-y` flag automatically keeps compiled files up to date, reducing subsequent load times. Error-message realms allow Racket-hosted langua...
The Twelve-factor app methodology turns 10. This blog posts re-evaluates the original factors against a decade of experience with software-as-a-service development and the maturing of serverless development.
pyscript.net Supporting open source and creating tools that enable people to do more with less are why I joined Anaconda almost eight years ago. Today,…
In software, it is a common problem to want to remove specific characters from a string. To make the problem precise, let us consider the removal of all ASCII control characters and spaces. In practice, it means the removal of all byte values smaller or equal than 32. I covered a related problem before, the … Continue…
Version 12 of GCC implements much of the recent C++ standard, allows a number of previously prohibited constructs, and fixes some problematic behaviors.
Tabular data is everywhere. I support reading and writing tabular data in various formats in all 3 of my software application. It is an important part of my data transformation software. But all th…
Learn Rust to 80% in 5 minutes by leveraging your existing JavaScript knowledge. In this article, I list a number of differences Rust has compared to JS that is crucial to understanding it.
This is a poorly structured list of common questions and answers about OCaml I had to ask myself or have been asked often.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
