Tricks and misconceptions about tui apps, like how to make terminal appear a lot responsive.

You could harden a Linux server by killing the init process. That would cause a kernel panic, and prevent new processes running (e.g. shells). Existing processes like Web servers would continue to function, so you could put this at the end of the boot script :)

I never thought that is possible! Kind of stupidily funny and brilliant at the same time.

A discussion about unconventional data structures and algorithms.

A collection of miniature programming languages which demonstrates various concepts and techniques used in programming language design and implementation.

A comment on hackernews summarized it well:

If you want to do great work, you need freedom first.

There's fundamentally 3 architypes of programmers, divided by which ideals we hold in highest esteem:

• You are a poet and a mathematician. Programming is your poetry
• You are a hacker. You make hardware dance to your tune
• You are a maker. You build things for people to use

And you don't have to pick one - I realize myself jumping between the three when coding. I often aim for the most beautiful code possible but can easily relegate to the rest when facing real-life challenges.

In short, after you finished your feature branch, reset the branch against master and re-create commit history based on logical groups.

A bunch of nice tricks to use browsers' web debugger console and console.log() faimilies.

More tricks shared in HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071700

A clever idea. It uses an unsafe non-existent function to induce link-time error. Normally, if the call to this non-existence function is proven unreachable by the compiler, then the call to this function will be removed and won't catch any errors. Otherwise it raises a link-time error instead of runtime error.

A nice textbook on programming language and type theory. I use it as a supplement material of Types and Programming Languages.

An accured list of computing weirdness. Each piece of text is a link that leads to the explanation.

I found it in a recent episode of the Corecursive podcast. https://corecursive.com/quines-polyglot-code/

Y combinator wonderfully-explained!

commonly used features in a side-by-side format

Huh! This is one question I've been thinking about since I learned some Assembly - why isn't there dynamically growing array on stack? This answer solved the mystery wonderfully:

1. because stack grows backwards (from high to low), the array index cannot be 0, 1, ... if we want to make the array grow in the same direction as the stack. The index would have to be 0, -1, -2, ...
2. You can't have more than one of such arrays for the array to be contiguous.
3. The array cannot grow when there are any stack push operations (e.g. function call).

Unison is a langauge where segments of code are not addressed by names (like function names), but by the hash of their contents represented as AST.

By building a language based on this central idea, the problem of dependency conflict is a non-problem. The author also demonstrated the potential of elastic distributed computing based on the idea.

This project reminds me of From Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Functional Containers, which is built around a similar idea, but implemented as a computing system instead of a programming language.

This article describes the security implication of using jwt token for authorization in order to save a db lookup.

• Logout doesn't log out if the token is still accessible
• Server-side cannot force block a user
• etc.

Very interesting insight for the role of parentheses in lisp languages.

If you model a Lisp as a stack language that evaluates from right to left, each parenthesized block must push exactly one value onto the stack, and must not consume any values.

Run SQL on different database engines and different versions. Supports most major DB engines, including PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite and more.