20911
The Nature of Lisp
An article about Lisp programming language.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,240 posts.
20912
It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)
It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Co...
20913
20914
Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
What’s the oldest laptop you could reasonably do your job with? 3 years old? 5 years? 10? And if asked the same question 10 years ago, would your number be higher or lower? Thanks to a failing batte…
20915
PHP in 2023
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
20916
Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
AI plays well at complex strategy games with uncertainty and incomplete information.
20917
When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell
Lessons learned from building Codescribble with a little help (and a lot of frustration) from an AI
20918
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: ...today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over d
20919
Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)
I have been programming in Lua for about 9 months and it seemed like a good time to pause and reflect on my experience with it. I have used various languages over the years -- Perl ( soaplite.com and other projects, including my current consulting work), C ( a DHCP /DNS server for Arduino and a ping-pong juggling…
20920
Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (2006)
Every square has exactly 3 units and 20 peers. For example, here are the units and peers for the square C2 :
20921
Sexism at Uber from Female Management
My last days at Uber in San Francisco were filled with disrespect, condescending managers, and sexism.
20922
Russiagate is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
20923
The Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics
On the existential crisis in gaming and the role of game design.
20924
The Right to Lie and Google’s “Web Environment Integrity”
This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it…
20925
Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
I congratulate the Linux Mint team for clearly taking a stand against snaps today by removing it from their repository, it was something m...
20926
Study finds memory decline surge in young people
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People
20927
Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
This post assumes some basic C skills. Linux puts you in full control. This is not always seen from everyone’s perspective, but a power user loves to be in control. I’m going to show yo…
20928
Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard
Before I start this post, let me preface it by saying that I’m not an experienced Rustacean by any means. The excellent foks at /r/rust gave a lot of helpful feedback and cleared up some misconceptions I had. Futher errata and corrections are appreciated. This post is aimed at helping other fledgling rust-learners…
20929
How Not to Buy a SSD
sugar, spice, and everything not nice
20930
C vs GO
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming.
20931
Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
20932
Why I Actively Discourage Online Tooling like jwt.io and Online JSON Validators
Why you should be opting for local tooling when working with sensitive data, even Non-Production ones.
20933
The End of the Beginning
The beginning of technology was about the shift from batched computing in one place to continuous computing everywhere. That era of paradigm changes may be over, which means the real changes are on…
20934
Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls
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…
20935
Google Home: An Insight Into a 4-Year-Old’s Mind
How Google Home provides an interesting insight into the curiosity of a 4-year-old.
20936
20937
The Future of AI Software Development
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
20938
Elon Musk says he will put millions of people on Mars
New Scientist – Musk declared recently that he could put a human on Mars in 10 to 20 years’ time. It is a remarkable claim, yet even more astonishingly Musk tells me that he could do it for $5 billion, and possibly as little as $2 billion – a snip when you consider that the International Space Station (ISS) has cost…
20939
NixOS is making me less afraid
Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it . That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.
20940
Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
What the hell is going on with our brains? It seems like the algorithms have already taken over and the scientific literature is catching up with