Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
I’ll start by saying that this is not a rant, but rather a cry of despair that I’m repeating and that slowly - but steadily - seems to come to consciousness in our industry, like this one. The phenomenon I’m about to describe is not only limited to the Javascript community either, that community seems a lot more…
There's nothing here. The Internet is far too dangerous right now. The blog may return in future, if I get around to it.
It’s been about a year since I’ve started using Elixir. Originally, I intended to use the language only for blogging purposes, thinking it could help me better illustrate benefits of Erlang Virtual Machine (EVM). However, I was immediately fascinated with what the language brings to the table, and very quickly…
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
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Meson's Xcode backend was originally written in 2014 or so and was never complete or even sufficiently good for daily use. The main reason f...
Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.
I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.
Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions. YAGNI—You Ain’t Gonna Need It—is a rule that says you shouldn’t add a feature just because it …
One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover , mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly…
Five years ago, I migrated my VPS from Arch Linux to NixOS. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never used Nix before. I thought I could figure it out. Five years later, I’m still running NixOS. And I still have no idea how it works.
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
In the past week I went to add Python 3.12 support to my zstandard Python package. A few hours into the unexpected yak shave / rat hole, I decided to start chronicling my experience so that I may share it with the broader Python community. My hope is that by sharing my (unfortunately painful) end-user experience that…
About two years ago I came across a .DS_Store file and wanted to extract its information (e.g. file names). After researching the file format and its security implications, as well as writing a parser for it, I would like to share my (limited) knowledge and the parser in Go / Python with the world. You might want to…
I examine the somewhat surprising way how Linux handles writes.
In my article on HTML web components , I said: But the unique power of web components (in the browser) is that they can render before JavaScript. React…
Yesterday I was working on a small feature for the Rust compiler, and came across a situation which really showcased Rust’s awesomeness as a language …
