Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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…
Update 26 Sep 2020: A followup to this post is Towards principled reactive UI.
Alex was with his family when he passed peacefully earlier today, Wednesday, February 27th. We would like to thank everyone across the globe for their love and support. It meant a lot to us and Ale…
PHP 7.4 adds typed properties to classes
Discussion on Hacker News This article and its topic were the subject of fairly detailed discussion on this thread here on Hacker News. Perusing through the comments should be well worth your time,…
A long time ago, the Rust language was a language with typestate. Officially, typestates were dropped long before Rust 1.0. In this entry, I’ll get you in on the worst kept secret of the Rust community: Rust still has typestates.
Federal prosecutors this week charged a Seattle woman with stealing data from more than 100 million credit applications made with Capital One Financial Corp . Incredibly, much of this breach played out publicly over several months on social media and other open online platforms. What follows is a closer look at the…
If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…
Monica Dinculescu's blog
(with Abhik Roychoydhury and Aditya Kanade) Why do some people get all their papers accepted, and others do not? You may already know th...
Analyzing compensation packages from 2019 new-graduate technology job offers.
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
What is GNU Readline and where did it come from?
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
In this post, you'll find out more on the legal aspect of web scraping and crawling, and what possible consequences you might face.
This is a declaration of love for personal websites, written from years of thinking on the subject, reviewing thousands of portfolios, building websites for friends and bookmarking those of strangers. It’s a subject I’m so passionate about, I built my business on it. And recently, it’s become a matter of principle…
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
In this post I'll talk about a small game I've been developing in about 24 hours in total (mostly in a few hour blocks during evenings or…
Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping…
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
