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Building on Rock, Not Sand
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,546 posts.
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AI changes the economics of software rewrites
AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems.
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The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
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Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…
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Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far
Disclaimer: This story took place when I was a junior developer for a previous employer ages ago. Some details might be fuzzy, and goes without saying this is entirely from my own POV so take everything here with humor and a grain of salt.
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Makefiles for web work
A set of recipes for using Makefiles for web development.
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Hopefully more controversial programming opinions
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Best Practices for Testing in Java (2019)
Modern best practices for unit tests and integration tests in Java and in general
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Let's stop building APIs around a network hack (2017)
JSON-API has been one of the most popular standards for API development for a while now. It was conceived in 2013, battled through some rather different RC versions (changing drastically as it went), finally stabilizing with v1.0 back in mid-2015. My interest in JSON-API has changed
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Some thoughts on personal Git hosting
As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested…
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Why is hash(-1) == hash(-2) in Python?
While browsing Reddit the other day waiting for my code to compile, I ran across this question on r/Python: is hash(-1) == hash(-2) an easter egg? Wait, is that really true? $ python Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 29 2021, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.1.1 20210531 (Red Hat 11.1.1-3)] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or…
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The importance of local development
Efficient software development benefits from local development, it enables faster iteration, better debugging and ensures consistency between local and production environments.
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Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)
How I learnt Elm (its good parts and bad) by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React.
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JavaScript string encoding
Node string encoding is all over the place. Let's try to straighten out how it works.
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Formalising a new proof that the square root of two is irrational
Recently, somebody shared on Twitter a new proof of the irrationality of √2. Its claimed advantage is that “it requires no knowledge of mathematics above the definition of what it means for a number to be irrational, and can be written almost in one line.” These claims are dubious: the usual proof, which I’ve…
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Replacing Pandas with Polars
I remember those days, oh so long ago, it seems like another lifetime. I haven’t used Pandas in many a year, decades, or whatever. We’ve all been there, done that. Pandas I mean. I would dare say it’s a rite of passage for most data folk. For those using Python, it’s probably one of the […]
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Tcl/tk vs. the web
I agree with you. How is it that in order to build an application on the web I need to know at least seven technologies? Client side: - Javascrit - Coffescript to make JS seem sane - Angular or Jquery to make JS seem productive - CSS - SASS to make CSS seem sane - HTML5 - localstorage (to save somethnig) Server side …
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Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard challenge
Short term financing makes it possible to acquire highly sought-after domains without the strain of upfront costs. Find your domain name today.
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Coreutils Gotchas (2015)
Confusing corners of the unix utilities
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Game Programming Patterns – Bytecode
Give behavior the flexibility of data by encoding it as instructions for a virtual machine.
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GCC and C vs C++ Speed, Measured
With the imminent release of gcc 4.8, GCC has finally switched to C++ as the implementation language. As usual, LWN has excellent coverage. Those with long memories will remember Linux trying to use g++ back in 1992 and retreating in horror at the larger, slower code. The main benefit was stricter typechecking…
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Haskell’s State monad is not a monad (2014)
Haskell’s State monad has a shameful secret. It’s not a monad [ State monads don’t respect the monad laws in Haskell, Simon Marlow ] . Look:
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