19561
Uninitialized memory: Unsafe Rust is too hard
Why unsafe Rust is a complex and user unfriendly experience.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,843 posts.
19562
Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy
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…
19563
What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers? (2014)
Almost every programming language uses 64-bit integers on typical modern Intel machines. OCaml uses a special 63-bit representation. How does it affect OCaml?
19564
Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
19565
Async hazard: MMAP is blocking IO
Memory-mapping a file is convenient, but it's a hazard when used with async/await concurrent code: it means a "simple" memory index does blocking IO.
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"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
19569
What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?
MirrorCode is Epoch AI's benchmark for long-horizon coding: AI can reimplement entire programs end-to-end, with no access to the original source code.
19570
Double-clicking on the Web
Here's a usability feature for the web: disable double-clicks on links and form submits. Before you think I'm a complete idiot, allow me to talk some sense into …
19571
Making Lenses Practical in Java
How (and why!) to convince the machines to write lenses for you
19572
A FactoryFactoryFactory in Production (2017)
No one has ever written a FactoryFactoryFactory and deployed it to production, right? This article takes a look at some real Java mishaps.
19573
What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
19574
Practical Vim command workflow (2023)
Master the art of efficient text navigation and editing in Vim with this comprehensive command workflow tutorial. Explore key commands and practical examples to enhance your productivity in Vim.
19575
Go Developer Survey 2021 Results
An analysis of the results from the 2021 Go Developer Survey.
19576
Baremetal programming on the tinyAVR 0 micro-controllers
All you need is a text editor, a makefile and a USB-serial cable.
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19579
Deprecating XML
Someone asked me recently what I thought about XML being removed from the Twitter streaming API. Around the same time, I heard that Foursquare are also moving to a JSON-only API.
19580
The JavaScript Black Hole: A playbook for ethical engineering on the web
A playbook for ethical engineering on the web.
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19582
Response to 'Reasons why Lisp games suffer'
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
19583
From first principles: Why I bet on Scala.js
Three years ago, I downloaded the nascent Scala.js compiler and tried to use it on a toy project.
19584
The APL Source Code (2012)
Thousands of programming languages were invented in the first 50 years of the age of computing. Many of them were similar, and many followed a traditional, evolutionary path from their predecessors. What eventually became APL was first a mathematical notation, not as a computer programming language.
19585
A curmudgeon tries a language server
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…
19586
Crit-bit Trees: the best way to store sets
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
19587
Monorepos in JavaScript and TypeScript
A tutorial how to use a monorepo architecture in frontend JavaScript and TypeScript with tools like npm/yarn/pnpm workspaces, Turborepo/NX/Lerna, Git Submodules, ...
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Blurring the Line Between User and Programmer
“The world’s been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken,” says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users…
19590
Rama on Clojure's terms, and the magic of continuation-passing style
Rama is a platform with huge applicability, able to express all the computation and storage for a backend at any scale. Just like the UNIX philosophy of composing simple programs to do more complex…