Stack Overflow is changing the wording of some of its close messages. For example, "unclear what you're asking" is now "needs detail or clarity". https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/337013/new-post-notices-rollout-on-stack-overflow
Definitely seems like a positive step.
miniblog.
Excellent overview of WebAssembly, its asm.js predecessor, and how the Rust ecosystem fits in: https://youtu.be/CMB6AlE1QuI
An English teacher introducing the notion of 'digital humanities', live coding with Wolfram Alpha and The Great Gatsby, and showing text mining projects done by students!
https://youtu.be/UaCrK6vyz_0
Deno is a JS/TypeScript runtime from the creator of node, with built-in sandboxing and URLs for importing packages without a central npm server: https://blog.logrocket.com/what-is-deno/
Bugs in AMD Ryzen microcode, BIOS updates, and how CPUs report capabilities: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend/
A critique of XML usage, and annotating documents rather than exchanging data: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml
It's rare to see discussions of good XML usage! I've seen marked-up word definitions (a multilingual dictionary) that were a nice fit for XML, but it's rare.
Lots of people have pointed out the advantage of https://foo.bar/ or foo->bar for syntax. It makes it easy to explore things you can do with foo.
I think it's an instance of a more general pattern: prefix syntax that an IDE can spot. This has interesting consequences!
Impressive growth in the Indian tech startup scene: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/india-tech-startups-fundraise/
Delightful talk on teaching programming to children: https://youtu.be/g1ib43q3uXQ
Explanations are important, teaching them to read code aloud helps, and skill development begets motivation!
The rise of platforms that promote unique users, digital content, and staying useful after a consumer has been matched up with a supplier:
https://a16z.com/2019/10/08/passion-economy/
Bert, a machine learning model for understanding natural languages, is showing some impressive results for parsing Google search terms:
https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/
Coalton is a remarkable ocaml-style language embedded in Common Lisp: https://github.com/stylewarning/coalton/
It includes a static type checker too!
It's a shame that live kernel updates aren't more common on consumer devices.
Auto updates are such a different experience and forcing people to reboot devices (especially smartphones) must slow the adoption of security updates.
On Unix being the default system even today, the value of understanding the incumbent, and the amount of redundant work in a boot process: https://www.sicpers.info/2015/01/and-in-the-end-there-will-be-the-command-line/
Imagine we JIT compiled syscall handlers in the kernel, based on runtime facts about known constants: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1676
An interesting idea that's little explored since Alexia Massalin's phD. Arguably unikernels have some similarities, but compiler tech is more mature now.
Programming language implementation work seems to be 10% interesting semantic work and 90% error checking against the possible malformed programs you might encounter.
Firefox 70 adds numeric separators to its JS implementation, so you can write 1_000_000. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Lexical_grammar#Numeric_separators
Not only is this feature becoming more common, it's interesting to see different programming language all settle on the _ as the separator.
Arbitrary code execution to convert Super Mario to Flappy Bird, done entirely by hand on a real device!
https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0
The first exploit modifies the UI to show exact sprite co-ordinates (used for the payload), then the new game is 331 bytes written with spin jumps!
'As We May Think' is an article from 1945 that introduced the idea of a 'memex', a personal computer with hyperlinked documents.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
It treats reading trails as a first class entity that can be commented and shared!
Darklang is exploring an IDE experience where you have values you can inspect as you write code. It does this by tracing recent requests and autorunning pure code.
It's neat! Seeing concrete values is a definite usability win.
https://medium.com/darklang/building-an-office-sign-in-in-dark-c2d980560695
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