10711
Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,545 posts.
10712
The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
10713
Go 1.21 will (probably) download newer toolchains on demand by default
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…
10714
Should you split that file?
Splitting code into files can scatter related logic. Jimmy Koppel on cognitive load, design reconstruction, and a third way to organize code.
10715
The Second Golden Age of Emacs
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarrell
10716
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainf*ck code results in an infinite loop, akin amost to a DDoS attack:
10717
Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
10718
Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
10719
Building a Raspberry Pi GPS Speedometer
Back in April of last year, the speedometer failed in my ‘94 Explorer. Rather than hunting down a replacement cable and tearing apart the dash just to restore an old analog needle, I opted to build a digital replacement using a Raspberry Pi and GPS.
10720
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
10721
10722
Why I write recursive descent parsers, despite their issues (2020)
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…
10723
Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
10724
Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
10725
Building Container Images with Nix
Dockerfiles are de facto standard for creating container images. In this article I highlight some issues with this approach and I propose building container images with Nix.
10726
I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
10727
10728
10729
10730
10731
10732
Big Programming, Small Programming – Glow, the language
Programming is complicated. Different programs have different abstraction levels, domains, platforms, longevity, team sizes, etc ad infinitum. There …
10733
10734
Fuzz me wrong – How QuickCheck destroyed my favourite theory
Quite a while back I wrote a larger article on the algebraic foundation of software patterns which also covered the MapReduce algorithm .
10735
Local First Htmx
Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…
10736
Visual programming should start in the debugger
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
10737
Version Control for Structure Editing
That’s the headline for my latest project (with Tomas Petricek), presented at HATRA. [paper] [recorded talk] With this work I am finally confronting the demon cursing my work: version control. If w…
10738
Obscure C++ Features
This page is a collection of obscure C++ features, gathered over the years as I've explored different corners of the language. C++ is very big and I'm always learning more about it. Hopefully you'll learn something from this page even if you already know C++ pretty well. The features below are roughly ordered from…
10739
10740
What’s New In Emacs 24.4
Discover what's new in Emacs 24.4 as I annotate most of the changes made to the new Emacs version.