Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,547 posts.
How a Vim user converts to Emacs
For many years I thought that the heretics of the Emacs clan [1] were clearly insane – the followers of Vim were obviously following the True Path. And then I was snared by the dark side. My …
SciPy - the embarrassing way to code
I’ve programmed in many languages before, indeed I’ve spent at least a year working in Basic, C, C++, C#, java, assembler, modula-2, powerhouse and prolog. One thing I’ve never done before is Matlab, well except a few basic exercises for some course I did way back. A couple of years ago I started using python and more…
Emacs 23 is very near
Emacs 23(.1) has been released ! After only just over two years since the previous version, emacs 23 has been released on July 29 200...
Lisp interpreter in 90 lines of C++
I've enjoyed reading Peter Norvig's recent articles on Lisp. He implements a Scheme interpreter in 90 lines of Python in the first , and dev...
Mono 2.8 has been released
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Gave up a day job Now what? - Income report #3
So here is my another monthly income report. At the beginning I would like to thank to all my loyal readers that are visiting my site (leave a comment on this post with a short HI if you want me to…
The Development Abstraction Layer
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…
Erlang: An Introduction to Records
Internally Erlang has only two internal compound data types: lists and tuples. Neither of these data types support named access, so creating associative arrays a la PHP, Ruby, or Python is an impossibility without additional libraries.
Why writing software is not like engineering
While my talent lies in software, my graduate studies were in computer engineering (designing and building digital computers). One observation always struck me: computer engineering seemed more straightforward than computer science (building software). There are a set of engineering design rules to follow and…
I just released F.lux for Ubuntu (fades your screens at night)
F.lux for Ubuntu is an indicator applet (like the new Messaging Menu), so it works very nicely on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10
Cdb: a fast, reliable, simple package for creating, reading constant databases
Packages that need to read cdb files should incorporate the necessary portions of the cdb library rather than relying on an external cdb library.
A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes.
An attempt to debunk some of the '20 minute web app' hype that is so prevalent at the moment, and present a more realistic and balanced account of the Django site I have just finished.
Programmer search engine
For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing them or deciding if they’re smart—it’s been findin…
Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
At Strange Loop 2010 , I gave a 20 minute talk on Lua. The talk briefly covered six reasons ( why , not how) to choose Lua for embedded scripting. Lua is safe, fast, simple, easily learned, and more popular that you might expect.
John Resig dissects the neural network javascript OCR captcha code
A pretty amazing piece of JavaScript dropped yesterday and it’s going to take a little bit to digest it all. It’s a GreaseMonkey script, written by ‘ Shaun Friedle ‘, that automatically solves captchas provided by the site Megaupload . There’s a demo online if you wish to give it a spin.
Big Ball of Mud (1999)
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD