20491
Wield Python's super() like a Jedi
If you aren’t wowed by Python’s super() builtin, chances are you don’t really know what it is capable of doing or how to use it effectively. Much has been written about super() and much of that wri…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
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C'mon, stop writing Java for Android
Stop writing Java for your Android apps! There are a slew of ways to build...
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C++ at Google: Here Be Dragons
Google has one of the largest monolithic C++ codebases in the world. We have thousands of engineers working on millions of lines of C++ code every day. To help keep the entire thing running and all these engineers fast and productive we have had to build some unique C++ tools, centering around the Clang C++ compiler.
20496
Android Developer Income Report #10
Last month has been looking like some slow down in my income and traffic. Fortunately it was only temporary as it is getting better with each day now. Anyway I still made quite nice income and as u…
20497
Treatise on Font Rasterisation
Font rasterisation is, in the author’s opinion, one of the most interesting fields of computer science. If music is the subjective application of physics, then font rasterisation is almost certainly the subjective application of computer science. The purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to provide an…
20498
Repairing Corrupted ZIP Files by Brute Force Scanning in C
My brother is a wonderful photographer , and took 14 gigabytes of photos at my recent graduation from Columbia, some of which I hope to post on PhotoFloat -- my web 2.0 photo gallery done right via static JSON & dynamic javascript .
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You're Using JSON, Why not MessagePack?
JSON is a fantastic format, anywhere people in your organization want to reach for XML, it’s always a good thing to ask the question “Why not JSON?”. The question I’d like you to ask the next time you’re reaching for your JSON hammer, is “Why not MessagePack?”.
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What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #3/3
In Part 1 of the series, we took a look at undefined behavior in C and showed some cases where it allows C to be more performant than "safe" languages.
20503
Cool, but obscure Unix tools
A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install…
20504
Working with git? These aliases will save you hours
I was just watching a friend of mine work with git, and he'd always type all the git commands in full, like git status and git push. I realized that he must not be the only one to do so, so I decided to write this quick blog post and encourage everyone to create Huffman coded aliases for the most commonly used...
20505
If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot
This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy. Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software means you'll encounter such people. You may have to work with them. You may have to argue with them (and they may be right). Quite some time ago I was horrified by the private…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #2/3
In Part 1 of our series, we discussed what undefined behavior is, and how it allows C and C++ compilers to produce higher performance applications than "safe" languages. This post talks about how "
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What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #1/3
People occasionally ask why LLVM-compiled code sometimes generates SIGTRAP signals when the optimizer is turned on. After digging in, they find that Clang generated a "ud2" instruction (assuming X86 code) - the same as is generated by __builtin_trap().
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"The worst algorithm in the world?"
You know the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Each number is the sum of the previous two. Let’s say the zeroth Fibonacci number is zero, so: $latex \begin{array}{r@{\…
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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MySQL Text vs. Varchar Performance
Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…
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Understanding the code inside Tornado, the asynchronous web server
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