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21242

Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)

A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…

21243

What webhooks are and why you should care

Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended…

21247

JEP 454: Foreign Function and Memory API

Introduce an API by which Java programs can interoperate with code and data outside of the Java runtime. By efficiently invoking foreign functions (i.e., code outside the JVM), and by safely accessing foreign memory (i.e., memory not managed by the JVM), the API enables Java programs to call native libraries and…

21251

How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .

21256

How To Become A Hacker

As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…

21258

New UUID formats have been approved

This document presents new time-based UUID formats which are suited for use as a database key. A common case for modern applications is to create a unique identifier for use as a primary key in a database table. This identifier usually implements an embedded timestamp that is sortable using the monotonic creation time…

21261

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…

21269

Great Hackers (2004)

July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…