Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
M'colleague Charles has introduced me to the most spectacular phrase - "Time To 200". That's a measurement of the length of time it takes a new user to go from signing up to your API to getting their first HTTP 200 response. Think about the last time you started using a new API... Fill in a tediously long registration…
There was a recent discussion on the Extreme Programming mailing list kicked off by Ron Jeffries saying he wants his XP back. The implication being that Extreme Programming is no longer practised, and that most “Agile” organisations are actually practising Flaccid Scrum – some agile process but little of the technical…
There are few articles on the design of command-line interfaces (CLIs), even if plenty of articles on designing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) exist. This article is an attempt at presenting some of the most important guidelines for CLI design.
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
Firstly, what exactly is CoreRT? From its GitHub repo .. a .NET Core runtime optimized for AOT (ahead of time compilation) scenarios, with the accompanying .NET native compiler toolchain
Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.
Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.
Some time ago, I played around with decompiling Java class files in a more efficient manner than traditional solutions like Vineflower allow. Eventually, I wrote an article on my approach to decompiling control flow, which was a great performance boost for my prototype. At the time, I believed that this method can be…
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
Aquiles Carattino helps technical founders and scientists transition from academia to entrepreneurship. Actionable advice on deep tech strategy, product management, and commercializing science.
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" The saying (also known as Linus' law) doesn't say that the bugs are found fast and neither does it say who finds them. My version of the law would be much more cynical, something like: "eventually, bugs are found", emphasizing the 'eventually' part. (Jim Zemlin apparently…
It has been eighteen years of libcurl ABI stability.
One of my hobbies is to collect information about where curl is used. The following car brands feature devices, infotainment and/or navigation systems that use curl - in one or more of their models. These are all brands about which I've found information online (for example curl license information), received photos…
OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to build native OS X apps using good ol’ JS. This article covers the basics and walks through building an example app.
For twenty years, the fastest known algorithm to multiply two n-by-n matrices, due to Coppersmith and Winograd, took a leisurely O(n2.376) steps. Last year, though, in his PhD thesis, Andrew Stot…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
I really like decision tables but they’ve fallen out of common knowledge. Let’s fix that. A decision table is a means of concisely representing branching and conditional computations. In the most basic form, you have some columns that represent the “inputs” as booleans and some columns that represent outputs and…
This article has been translated to Japanese by Kana Takahashi on POSTD. The display property is one of the most important CSS properties we use for layout.…
I sometimes find myself in a position of needing to write some code that I’m just not sure how to write. Been there have you? Here are the steps I take when I’m stumped. No huge revelations here, just hard-earned advice.
I mentioned earlier on Twitter that my home computer downloaded a 22 GB database dump every three days as part of Instapaper’s backup method, and a lot of people expressed interest in knowing the full setup.
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…
