2251
Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up (2008)
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,307 posts.
2252
Technical Issues of Separation in Lisp Function Cells and Value Cells (1988)
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
2253
A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
2254
2255
Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of re…
2256
Feature Toggles
Feature Flags can be categorized into several buckets; manage each appropriately. Smart implementation can help constrain complexity.
2257
Rethinking PID 1 (2010)
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
2258
OpenTimestamps: Scalable, Trust-Minimized, Distributed Timestamping with Bitcoin
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
2259
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
2260
Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
2261
How Hacker News ranking algorithm works
In this post I’ll try to explain how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works and how you can reuse it in your own applications. It’s a very…
2262
Golang data races to break memory safety
Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember m...
2263
(Emacs) Keyboard Shortcuts for Editing Text Fields in OS X
A comparison of Emacs and OS X keyboard shortcuts for editing text.
2264
NIST is No Longer Recommending Two-Factor Authentication Using SMS
NIST is no longer recommending two-factor authentication systems that use SMS, because of their many insecurities. In the latest draft of its Digital Authentication Guideline, there’s the line: [Out of band verification] using SMS is deprecated, and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance.
2265
Proebsting's Law
This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%. Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions.
2266
Book Review: Albion’s Seed
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
2267
Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
2268
Wizards and warriors, part one
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
2269
How Plex is doing HTTPS for all its users
This week Plex , a self-hosted media server, announced that they now offer TLS to secure all connections, including those to the user’s servers. This is actually pretty interesting.
2270
Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
2271
Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
2272
What’s the matter with PGP?
Last Thursday, Yahoo announced their plans to support end-to-end encryption using a fork of Google’s end-to-end email extension. This is a Big Deal. With providers like Google and Yahoo onboa…
2273
Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
2274
Ranto (JBR Anti‐Zamenhofism)
Esperanto: espèce de conlang
2275
Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
2276
GC support in Rust: API design
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
2277
Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
2278
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
2279
Schizophrenia: No Smoking Gun
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophren…
2280
The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, processes, and other people. These people have opinions, and they share them all