271
On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
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LSP: The good, the bad, and the ugly
For a few years now I have been working on the Haskell Language Server (HLS), and the lsp library for the LSP protocol and writing LSP servers. Unsurprisingly, I have developed some opinions about the design of the LSP! Recently I gave a talk about HLS and LSP at the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop at Zurihac 2024. One…
273
Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs
Designing a dictionary of visually unambiguous characters for IDs.
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Lesser known parts of Python standard library
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
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Web components are okay
Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a…
276
Serialization Is the Secret
If a value mutates in the forest with no one to see it, does it really mutate?
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Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
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Bus Number – The GitHub plugin my coworkers asked me not to write
This blog post was written together with <mclare> , who made coooool visualizations like the picture at the end of the post!
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tolower() with AVX-512
A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.
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Unusual Raku Features
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
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Mario Maker 2 API
Mario Maker 2 API, created Thursday, February 10, 2022
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Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ
After getting to work on some personal projects using Go+HTMX+Templ this year, I have decided to give up on using React on any personal projects. You can actually find a lot of compelling arguments for ditching React in favor of HTMX in the essays found in the HTMX official website. But I feel that not that many…
283
Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
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The web's clipboard, and how it stores data of different types
Exploring the web’s clipboard APIs, their limitations, and their history.
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The tragedy of running an old Node project
You want it to just work. But it resists.
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Rewrite It in Rails
In 2022 I started building an application for creating Customs declarations. After evaluating some options and writing code in various programming languages ...
288
How do HTTP servers figure out Content-Length?
Anyone who has implemented a simple HTTP 1.1 server can tell you that it is a really simple protocol. Basically, it's a text file that has some specific rules t…
289
SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
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Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 1
I was recently made maintainer of the json gem, and aside from fixing some old bugs, I focused quite a bit on its performance, so that it is now the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby on most benchmarks.
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Algorithms we develop software by
Pathfinding applied to the software solution domain
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Safe relational database queries using the Rust type system
New database library for Rust
293
A quick post on Chen's algorithm
Update (April 19): Yilei Chen announced the discovery of a bug in the algorithm, which he does not know how to fix. This was independently discovered by Hongxun Wu and Thomas Vidick. At present, th…
294
Piccolo – A Stackless Lua Interpreter
piccolo is an interpreter for the Lua language written in pure, mostly safe Rust with an eye towards safe sandboxing and resiliency. It uses gc-arena for its garbage collection system, and in fact gc-arena was originally created as part of piccolo .
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Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
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Using Erlang hot code updates
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.
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The Swift compiler is slow due to how types are inferred
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
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Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
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Opening Windows in Linux with sockets, bare hands and 200 lines of C
In this post I want to create a single file C file program to open a windows inside Linux without using xlib or any similar libraries. The idea is to explore X11 protocol and see how it is used to interact with X server to create windows.