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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 108 posts.
Rails and Merb Merge
Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation. Before talking tech, and even going into the details of the announcement, I want
Why Learning Haskell/Python Makes You a Worse Programmer
A rant about how annoying programming in C# is, really.
Understanding Ruby Blocks, Procs and Lambdas
Robert leads large and complex firms through mission-critical Digital Transformations with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Engineering. As a Presidential Innovation Fellow at Barack Obama's White House , Robert reformed digital services across the Federal Government, resulting in millions of veterans…
How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?
Recently I was discussing Converge with someone, and mentioned how little time the core compiler had taken to implement (no compile-time meta-programming, limited error checking, but a functioning compiler nonetheless) - only a few days. The chap I was talking to looked at me and told me that he didn’t believe me. I…
On Python packaging
So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …
Java is Dead; Long Live Python
Version 3.0 of Python has been released . Notably Python has again done something Java has long resisted: it has broken backwards compatibility with Python 2.x. Notable fixes include a much saner string processing model based on Unicode. I am told by my Pythonista colleagues that a lot of other weirdnesses such as the…
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim
Hi all. I am starting a new article series called Vim Plugins You Should Know About. As the title suggests, this series is going to be about Vim plugins that you should know about and be using. The first article in this series will be about one of my favorite plugins called surround.vim. So what is surround.vim plugin?
Let's talk about Python 3.0
There's an old joke, so old that I don't even know for certain where it originated, that's often used to …
Linus Torvalds: Debugging hell
So I've spent much of the last couple of days remotely debugging this insane suspend failure (or to be exact, resume failure) that happens ...
The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
Python 3.0 Released
The official home of the Python Programming Language
A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's Weblog
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
Announcing my free book on Vim
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
My Job Interview at Google
A while ago I had an on-site job interview at Google. The position I was interviewing for was a Google SRE. SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. Site reliability engineers (SREs) are both software engineers and systems administrators, responsible for Google's production services end-to-end. I interviewed…
A Costly Parade, by Why the Lucky Stiff, and that NodeBox pong game -- in Shoes
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GCC hacks in the Linux kernel
The open source operating system that runs the world.
gorilla arm
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…