The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
Learn C The Hard Way (LCTHW) is a practical book teaching real world useful C using the same proven Learn The Hard Way method. LCTHW teaches real robust C coding and defensive programming tactics on real hardware rather than abstract machines and pedantic theory. The book emphasizes breaking your code on purpose, and…
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…
Tour de Babel Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ This is my whirlwind languages tour — the one I was going to write for the Amazon Developers Journal this month, but couldn't find a way to do it that was... presentable. For one thing, I lapse occasionally into coarseness and profanity here, so it
Due to the recent php2shell vulnerability , to save time and effort for both users and maintainers alike, and out of an overabundance of caution, all Scripts sites have had PHP (php-cgi) disabled until a patch is available and backported.
I’m glad to share a new project called Python for Android. The goal of this project is to package your python application into an APK. …
Why I switched from GNU screen to tmux: horizontal and vertical splits, sane defaults, and auto-arranged panes. Plus my short .tmux.conf and resources.
My fourth book.
Since this post got quite popular I decided to incorporate some of the excellent suggestions posted in the comments, so this list now has more than …
I remember the first time I interviewed for a front-end programming position and got asked how to do something in JavaScript on a white board. The specifics are vague, but it’s crystal clear how stupid it made me feel and how little it had to do with the actual job. Since then I’ve r…
Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
A new year is upon us. Before the world ends, let’s take a look back at what 2011 meant for everybody’s favorite programming language:
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked "Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?" in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated. Why I don't think it has to be that way. Why would…
I first heard about The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python at PyCodeConf a few months ago. It's a fantastic idea: open source, community-driven documentation on how to do Python right: everything from how to learn Python, to how to write idiomatic code, to how to distribute your projects, to surveys of best-of-breed open…
oCERT-2011-003 multiple implementations denial-of-service via hash algorithm collision
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
Introduction This is the first part of a series of blog posts I intend to write, whose aim will be to explain how garbage collection works in the real world (in particular, with the JVM). I will co…
Take a look at this Perl regular expression: perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^(11+?)\1+$/ && print "$_ is composite"' This regular expression matches only the composite numbers (and doesn't match prime numbers). Can you figure out how it works? I'll give the explanation below but try to figure it…
