Dsxyliea
A friend who has dyslexia described to me how she experiences reading. She can read, but it takes a lot of concentration, and the letters seems to “jump around”.
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
On 22 June 2016, Unicode version 9.0 was published . As part of that, 4 new symbols were introduced – and another one was re-purposed.
How to C in 2016
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
Programming books you might want to consider reading
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the…
Zero-cost futures in Rust
One of the key gaps in Rust’s ecosystem has been a strong story for fast and productive asynchronous I/O . We have solid foundations, like the mio library, but they’re very low level: you have to wire up state machines and juggle callbacks directly.
Web Scraping in 2016
Software Engineer
Page Dewarping
Flattening images of curled pages, as an optimization problem.
Ripgrep – A new command line search tool
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
Talks that changed the way I think about programming
The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester destroying any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened to be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because we didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he destroyed it. He…
Writing a video chat application from the ground up, part 1
What I cannot create, I do not understand. – Richard Feynman I do a lot of video chat for work. If it’s not a one on one, it’s pair programming. If it’s not pair programming…
Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, at approximately 14:20 in the interview, he made a quick point about…
It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)
(A true story.) Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get...
Parsing JSON is a Minefield
[2016-10-26] First version of the article [2016-10-28] Presentation at Soft-Shake Conference, Geneva ( slides ) [2016-11-01] Article and comments in The Register [2017-11-16] Presentation at Black Alps Security Conference, Yverdon ( slides ) [2018-03-09] Presentation at Toulouse Hacking Conference ( slides )…
Happiness is a Boring Stack
I can't tell you how nice it is to have software in production on a boring stack. It gives you freedom to do other things.
Why does calloc exist?
[Edit: Welcome Hacker News readers! Before we dive into the neat memory management esoterica, I want to briefly note that as engineers we have an ethical obligation in our work to consider the "safety, health, and welfare of the public" , because if we don't, terrible things happen . This is a challenging…
How to Deploy Software
Things Zach Holman said.
How I fixed a bug in Atom
When good regexes go bad