I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal, and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me. Life just wasn’t so heavy back then.
gynvael 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather: let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it too).
yomismoaqui 2 hours ago [-]
Sadly I don't know if that kind of 80s/90s irreverence would go well with today's sensitivities.
skeeter2020 53 minutes ago [-]
that's the point! we got so concerned with creating a safe space for everyone that can't possible offend we lost site of the community building intent. The crux is to have people self-select without offending them, but IMO it's not a binary goal.
23 minutes ago [-]
39 minutes ago [-]
pixelpoet 3 hours ago [-]
like Mondo 2000 :)
big_toast 1 hours ago [-]
Wow cool. I have not heard of Mondo 2000 reading hn for almost 20 years. And did not realize Boing Boing was so old. Makes me wonder what else existed.
My family had a bunch of "Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia"[0] and similar things (BYTE, COMPUTE!). (Which seem slightly dryer, but maybe more like Paged Out.)
Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our hands.
giahug 4 hours ago [-]
yes!
roer 21 minutes ago [-]
I have the printed versions of issue #6 and #7, I highly recommend them!
> Query based compilers are all the rage: Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Haskell, and Clang all structure their compilers as queries.
I've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into details.
thunderseethe 5 hours ago [-]
It is a double edged sword of the single page layout that you really have to make one point briefly and get out of there. I had to pare down many details to fit the layout.
If you want to learn how to implement a query based compiler, I have a tutorial on that here: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/lsp-base/ (which I also highly recommend but that might be more obvious since I wrote it)
neandrake 46 minutes ago [-]
Finding this one-page was great! It gave me a new term I didn't have before that leads to all sorts of new materials to go rifling through.
EDIT: Fixed. It wasn't the tags - it was a trailing space we had in the "database". I honestly though I've handled that case, but apparently not .
jstrieb 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I submitted my article.
Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!
gynvael 2 hours ago [-]
This goes to the "fix me" list. We're planning a rebuild in the next few days anyway, so it should get fixed then.
Graziano_M 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like this tweet suggests that the PDF is a polyglot or an embedded second PDF.
Oh yeah. I have the paperback 'bible'. I don't think that that one is a polyglot, though.
bayindirh 1 hours ago [-]
Can’t you use the tome as a cluebat?
I believe it’s a dual use tool, hence a polyglot.
gynvael 2 hours ago [-]
PoC||GTFO is the GOAT
gynvael 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, no, sorry, no polyglots there yet. We'll get there one day, but so far our tooling doesn't allow for it yt.
wang_li 2 hours ago [-]
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
layer8 15 minutes ago [-]
I noticed that as well. Also misleading titles like “Eliminating Serialization Cost using B-trees” where the cost savings are actually for deserialization (from a custom format), and the self-balancing nature of B-trees isn’t actually relevant, and neither are insertion/deletion, so a single tree level is sufficient. It’s a stretch to refer to it as a B-tree.
gynvael 2 hours ago [-]
You're right.
In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge scientific journal — rather than that, we publish even the smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and find it fun/interesting to learn.
The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the list ;)
P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)
j2kun 1 hours ago [-]
I took a peak at "Compiler Education Deserves a Revolution" and thought, wtf is this talking about?
It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass."
What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.
ihaveone 3 hours ago [-]
This is so awesome, do you have a mailing list, RSS, etc?
My family had a bunch of "Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia"[0] and similar things (BYTE, COMPUTE!). (Which seem slightly dryer, but maybe more like Paged Out.)
[0]:https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/mode/2up
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pagedout
I've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into details.
If you want to learn more about query based compilers as a concept, I highly recommend ollef's aritcle: https://ollef.github.io/blog/posts/query-based-compilers.htm...
If you want to learn how to implement a query based compiler, I have a tutorial on that here: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/lsp-base/ (which I also highly recommend but that might be more obvious since I wrote it)
No, not giving spoilers except there might be some polyglot files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
Note that you can link to pages in a PDF with a hash like #page=64 (for example) in the URL.
https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_008.pdf#page=64
EDIT: Fixed. It wasn't the tags - it was a trailing space we had in the "database". I honestly though I've handled that case, but apparently not .
Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!
https://x.com/gynvael/status/2024180784064598134
If you like polyglot files, see https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
I believe it’s a dual use tool, hence a polyglot.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge scientific journal — rather than that, we publish even the smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and find it fun/interesting to learn.
The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the list ;)
P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)
It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass."
What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.