Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,549 posts.
Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you
Parallelogram is a demo running on the Commodore One extender board, which contains an Altera Cyclone III FPGA and an SDRAM chip. The logic design was made from scratch, including a homebrew CPU, FM synth and blitter with pixel shader support. The demo won the wild compo at Revision 2012 .
Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
Encoding business logic in types
Introduction The Three Projections of Futamura are a sequence of applications of a programming technique called 'partial evaluation' or 'sp...
“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…
A recent paper suggested a new mathematical point of view on version control. I first found out about it from pijul, a new version control system (VCS) that ...
Over the last several years we’ve seen a whole range of ideas regarding the architecture of systems. These include:
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
What follows is the text of my presentation, Functional options for friendly APIs that I gave at dotGo this year. It has been edited slightly for readability.
A while back I did a series of postings on the topic of Common Misconceptions About Publishing.
A small number of popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries account for a substantial portion of the network, battery, and time budgets of users of the contemporary Web. Many applications include these libraries even if they only use a small portion of the functionality they provide. Large improvements seem possible…
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
Note: The gzipped and Zopflinated file sizes refer to the total byte size of the file after compressing it using gzip or Zopfli with the default settings . For gzip, this boils down to gzip -6 file.js — the default compression level is 6 on a scale from 1 (fastest, but less compression) to 9 (slowest, but best…
Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs
In Chapter 7 I briefly discussed the extended LOOP macro. As I mentioned then, LOOP provides what is essentially a special-purpose language just for writing iteration constructs.
All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.
I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…
Look at this incredible thing Ian Baker created. Look at it! What you’re seeing is not Photoshopped. This is an actual photo of a real world, honest to God double-clawed hammer. Such a thing exists. Isn’t that amazing? And also, perhaps, a little disturbing? That wondrous hammer
deltaDistX = sqrt(1 + (rayDirY * rayDirY) / (rayDirX * rayDirX)) deltaDistY = sqrt(1 + (rayDirX * rayDirX) / (rayDirY * rayDirY))
PowerShell is a spiced up command line shell made by Microsoft. According to some people, it is a really useful and good shell alternative. Already a long time ago, we got bug reports from confused users who couldn't use curl from their PowerShell prompts and it didn't take long until we figured out that Microsoft ……
Does JavaScript use UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding? Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this question anywhere, I decided to look into it. The answer depends on what you’re referring to: the JavaScript engine, or JavaScript at the language level.
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems,
