Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,835 posts.
Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images. Even though the…
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*…in all the ways that don’t matter.
MySQL is the last major SQL database that has evolved beyond SQL-92 by introducing window functions (OVER) and common table expressions (WITH [RECURSIVE])
Git has a reputation for being confusing. Users stumble over terminology and phrasing that misguides their expectations. This is most apparent in commands that “rewrite history” such as git cherry-pick or git rebase. In my experience,…
Whenever discussing problems with programming today and potential solutions, invariably someone will pop up and declare that the problem is ...
An edge case in integer safety.
CoffeeScript is an open source project that provides a new syntax for JavaScript. I have to say that I have a lot of respect for CoffeeScript and it got a lot of things right. The “golden rule” of CoffeeScript is “It’s just JavaScript” . That means there is a straightforward equivalent to every line of CoffeeScript…
Frameworks are one of the hugest anti-patterns in software development. They're hard to learn. They limit your creativity. They increase your project's complexity and dependencies. They go out of business and get abandoned. You have to maintain and upgrade your code to match the latest framework versions for no good...
I've always been told that caching is a tool to make software faster. That, given some careful considerations to consistency, caching makes it so that when...
Revealing the Darker Side of Productive Coding A few weeks ago we finished the Early Access Program for the upcoming release of IntelliJ IDEA 12. We would like to thank all of you who evaluated the p
A little more than a year ago we started talking about where add-ons were headed, and what the future would look like. It’s been busy, and we wanted to give ...
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
m4 is a macro processor, in the sense that it copies its input to the output, expanding macros as it goes
The Windows API — a.k.a. Win32 — is notorious for being clunky, ugly, and lacking good taste. Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job with backwards compatibility, but the trade-off is that the API is filled to the brim with historical cruft. Every hasty, poor design over the decades is carried forward forever…
At a recent Clojure Berlin Meetup , Veit Heller gave an interesting talk on Macros in Clojure. The meetup was very enjoyable, and the talk...
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
The array reduce method is really powerful. But people often run into trouble as soon as they step beyond the basic examples. Simple things like addition and multiplication are fine. But as soon as you try it with something more complicated, it breaks. Using it with anything other than numbers starts to get really…
Let's start by looking at a simple C function to be compiled as position-independent code (i.e. -fPIC , for use in a shared library):
Implementing a programming language is an experience no programmer should go without; the process fosters a deep understanding of computation, and it's fun!
An exploration of how Extism makes it easy to use WebAssembly
A few years ago, on a whim, I wrote YAIOUOM. YAOIOUM was a static analyzer for Rust that checked that the code was using units of measures correctly, e.g. a distance in meters is not a distance in centimeters, dividing meters by seconds gave you a value in m / s (aka m * s^-1). YAIOUOM was an example of a refinement…
This blog post is adapted from a lightning talk I gave at the Boston Golang meetup in December of 2015. For a while, it seemed like everyone was crazy for microservices. You couldn’t open up your favorite news aggregator of choice without some company you had never heard of touting how the move t
