The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.
If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work on can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean…
In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a…
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, which has purchase links—paperback and ebook—and a preview of the first pages. You can see more snippets later in the book on the…
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS Lambda Supports Python 3.7
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…
40 common false assumptions programmers make about names, debunked with real-world examples from global naming systems and identity practices.
On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.
I recently attended the Matthias Felleisen Half-Time Show, a symposium held in Boston on 3rd November in celebration of Matthias’s 60th birthday. I was honoured to be able to give a talk ther…
I remember the excitement when AWS Lambda was announced in 2014! Four years on, customers are using Lambda functions for many different use cases. For example, iRobot is using AWS Lambda to provide compute services for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, Fannie Mae to run Monte Carlo simulations for millions of…
How Go 2 proposals will be evaluated, selected, and shipped.
As a researcher/engineer (really, an algorithm developer) in the general area of audio and speech processing, I've always run into the same difficulty at all the companies I've worked at: How to quickly prototype and develop algorithms, and subsequently turn them into efficient code that can be deployed to customers.
Extensions allow Postgres to be customized and extended in powerful new ways. Here we find a tour of extensions and how they can make Postgres into much more than a relational database
With OTP-21 came a new logging library in Erlang called logger . It comes as an attempt to offer a built-in alternative to long successful projects such as lager , which have seen years of battle testing and tweaking for performance. I've seen few articles written about the new logger and what it can do, so I've…
Sixteen years later, ES6/ES2015 introduced Unicode mode (the u flag) , sticky mode (the y flag) , and the RegExp.prototype.flags getter .
A short essay about Fortran in the modern world.
One of my favorite Amazon Leadership Principles is Customer Obsession. When we launched AWS Lambda, we focused on giving developers a secure serverless experience so that they could avoid managing infrastructure. In order to attain the desired level of isolation we used dedicated EC2 instances for each customer. This…
Infrastructure code lessons from a HashiConf 2018 talk by Gruntwork, with the video, the slides, and a condensed written version of five key takeaways.
Practical advice on getting the most out of handling errors "the Go way" from the creator of imgproxy and Overmind.
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 1. lisp to assembly
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
An interesting, and (as it turned out) doomed, method of combining async and synchronous Python code
Having created my first app using Flutter, I weigh up the technology’s pros and cons against React Native
