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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
Tor project decides to fork Firefox
In a random bar about two years ago, a Google Chrome developer asked me why Torbutton didn't...
The 10 commandments of good source control management
Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get
The context sensitivity of C's grammar
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives
Objective-C remains an impediment for many programmers coming to the Mac or iPhone platforms — few programmers have ever experienced it before learning Cocoa, forcing two learning curves at once for new Cocoa developers. How did Apple end up with such a weird language? And for a company known to replace CPU…
PyPy 1.5 Released: Catching Up
We're pleased to announce the 1.5 release of PyPy. This release updates PyPy with the features of CPython 2.7.1, including the standard libr...
The Linux perf command rocks
A summary of Linux profiling/monitoring tools
IOS games using JavaScriptCore without WebKit
Less talk, more action – Apple just approved two of my JavaScript games for the AppStore: Biolab Disaster and Drop . Both are free; go check them out. You can also play them in your browser here and here .
The myth of the Lisp genius
I'm fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp. I'm not saying that such geniuses don't exist; they do. Here I'm using "myth" in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I'm thinking myth in the sense of…
Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?
One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the same, except that one block refers to “Sp…
Linus Torvalds on Garbage Collection (2002)
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
Doom engine code review
Before studying the iPhone version, it was important for me to understand how Doom engine WAS performing rendition back in 1993. After all the OpenGL port must reuse the same data from the WAD archive. Here are my notes about Doom 1993 renderer, maybe it will help someone to dive in. January 13th, 2010 : Reddit…
Go At Heroku (Doozer)
Two Heroku system engineers discuss their experiences using Go.
Actual JavaScript Engine Performance
JSMeter: Measuring JavaScript Behavior in the Wild showed that benchmarks are not representative of the behavior of real web applications. But lacking credible benchmarks, engine developers are tuning to what they have. The danger is that the performance of the engines will be tuned to non-representative benchmarks…
(Android) Developer Income Report #9
My March 2011 developer income report is here. As you will see there are no much changes but the eBook sales (one more time thank you to all of you for your great feedback!). As promised to those w…
Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls: 25 years old, still brilliant
To my astonishment, I see that it’s been a whole year since the last installment in the Programming Books series (1, Coders at Work; 2, The Elements of Programming Style; 3, Programming the …
Comparing images in pure Ruby (and how Github's image diff works)
In this article, I’ll try to explain how an image diff could be built using pure Ruby and ChunkyPNG.
Web development is just broken
No, really, there’s something deeply flawed with web development. And I’m not (just) talking browser incompatibilities, or Ruby vs. Java vs. PHP vs. anything else or about Flash or HTML…
Git can't be made consistent
This post complains about Git lacking eventual consistency. I have a little secret for you: Git can't be made to have eventual consistency. Everybody seems to think the problem is a technical one, of complexity vs. simplicity of implementation. They're wrong. The problem is semantics. Git follows…