Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.
This post looks at the Closure Compiler, Google's tool from the mid-2000s for adding types to JavaScript. It looks at how its focus on minification led to very different design choices than TypeScript, and how this and a few other factors led to TypeScript becoming the ubiquitous solution for JavaScript + types. The…
Don't "let it crash". Let it heal.
A simple principle to help structure code better
Back pressure for agents You might notice a pattern in the most successful applications of agents over the last year. Projects that are able to setup structure around the agent itself, to provide it with automated feedback on quality and correctness, have been able to push them to work on longer horizon tasks. This…
Understanding how the group by and having clauses work can help us write more efficient SQL. I want to demonstrate this with an example…
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather ( < nather@astro.as.utexas.edu > ), on May 21, 1983.
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
About two years ago, I wrote a quite complicated diff tool in Clojure. It was complicated enough that I struggled to fit the algorithm in my head and the inputs were large enough that I had to make some efforts to improve performance.
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week: …or we could just box it. There’s two remarkable things about this sentence. The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and in...
In our previous post, we introduced how to utilize Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in PicoLisp. Now, let's explore another application: a railroad model…
TL;DR: Many badges were broken since they were using the shuttered pypip.in site. I wrote a bot that could fix these and automatically submit pull requests with the changes. And then I had my GitHub account suspended. Do not make automatic unsolicited pull requests. Disclaimer This post discusses the design...
Emacs now has a builtin cheat sheet for a large swathe of common elisp functions. If you can't remember exactly how to do something, then this is a great place to look for it first.
Covers two Linux primitives that are not namespaced by the current set of Linux kernel namespaces.
I don't have time to keep up with all the daft Open Source projects I release. I wish my skill and my energy was as wide as my ambition. Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them…
This is a quick writeup of a steganographic tool that I threw together: steg86 . It uses a quirk of the x86 instruction encoding format to hide messages in pre-existing binaries with no size or performance overhead.
The “Sufficiently Clever Compiler” has become something of a trope in the Lisp community: the mythical beast that promises language and interface designers near-unlimited freedom, and leaves their output in a performance lurch by its non-appearance. A few years ago, I was young enough to join a research project to…
In a recent blog post , I talked about why every system that implements MVCC needs some scheme for removing old row versions, and how VACUUM...
I love machine learning algorithms. I've taught classes and seminars and given talks on ML. The subject is fascinating to me, but like all skills fascination simply isn't enough. To get good at something, you need to practice! I also happen to be a PHP and JavaScript developer.
You already know that a + b * c + d is calculated as a + (b * c) + d. But how do you encode that knowledge precisely enough for a machine to act on it?
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
“With more careful calculations, one can win; with less, one cannot” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War .
Recently I did a userspace implementation of the Host Identity Protokoll (HIPv2, RFC 7401) with the upcoming Diet Exchange (HIP DEX, IETF draft 6) . Doing so, I've learnt a lot about raw socktet programing under Linux and here I want to share a few things with you.
Lazarus Lazaridis’ personal blog with posts mostly related to programming and opensource. And cats.
