Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,540 posts.
SQL:2023 has been wrapped. The final text has been submitted by the working group to ISO Central Secretariat, and it’s now up to the ISO gods when it will be published. Based on past experience, it could be between a few weeks and a few months.
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
Making English more enjoyable to write.
5 bash tricks I find myself using often that I wish I'd discovered sooner.
I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the…
If a value mutates in the forest with no one to see it, does it really mutate?
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…
Hello, everyone! Click here for up to date build instructions Today I am happy to make the first release of the Common Lisp implementation “Clasp”. Clasp uses LLVM as its back-end and generates nat…
bstr is a byte string library for Rust and its 1.0 version has just been released ! It provides string oriented operations on arbitrary sequences of bytes, but is most useful when those bytes are UTF-8. In other words, it provides a string type that is UTF-8 by convention , where as Rust’s built-in string types are…
If you live in a major city, there’s a good chance you’ve used (or at least heard of) food delivery services like Postmates, GrubHub, or DoorDash. These services are great for times when I’m behind on groceries or when I’m getting some late night studying in before a big midterm or final. The only problem with these…
Personal webpage of Fabian Mentzer.
The log is a totally-ordered, append-only data structure. It’s a powerful yet simple abstraction—a sequence of immutable events. It’s something that programmers have been using for a very long time, perhaps without even realizing it because it’s so simple. Whether it’s application logs, system logs, or access logs…
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for…
Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
An article titled Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming came out today and it's getting a lot of attention. I have a feeling that it's viewed in a wrong context, so I'd like to comment on the issue raised there.
Microservices are awesome. We know this because of all the success stories that are circulating lately. The news is full of such stories, of people taking large, monolithic codebases, breaking them up, adding HTTP APIs and enjoying all the benefits.
I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…
When was the first time you had to use LaTeX? If you are like most people, it was probably suddenly forced upon you during your first math or CS class where you had to start writing proofs, with minimal guidance on how to get started. Unfortunately, this meant that while many people have good operational knowledge of…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
After a year of working with a large AngularJS project, I thought I’d share a few of the lessons that I learned in the process. Firstly, I love AngularJS. It suits my needs exceedingly well, and I expect it will be my goto for the forseeable future when I need a solid framework for “thick client” single page…
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
Unity game development guide for software engineers. Start from first principles with scenes, game objects, components, and serialization.
This blog post was written together with <mclare> , who made coooool visualizations like the picture at the end of the post!
How to save hours by trimming videos without reencoding or rerendering.
There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.
