The web platform is the delivery mechanism of choice for a ton of software these days, either through the web browser itself or through Electron, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for a good old fashioned straight-up desktop application in the picture.

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to write a usable, pretty, and performant desktop app, using my language of choice (Rust) and the wildly successful cross-platform GUI framework GTK.

GUI prototyped using Glade.

I’ve used MATLAB for over 25 years. (And before that, I even used MATRIXx, a late, unlamented attempt at a spinoff, or maybe a ripoff.) It’s not the first language I learned to program in, but it’s the one that I came of age with mathematically. Knowing MATLAB has been very good to my career.
However, it’s impossible to ignore the rise of Python in scientific computing. MathWorks must feel the same way: not only did they add the ability to call Python directly from within MATLAB, but they’ve adopted borrowed some of its language features, such as more aggressive broadcasting for operands of binary operators.

Today I want to talk about fzf and ripgrep, two tools I use all the time when working in Vim and the terminal. They have become an absolutely vital part of my workflow. Ever since I started using them I can’t imagine myself functioning without them anymore.

I have a saying that summarizes my opinion of Rust compared to Go: “Go is the result of C programmers designing a new programming language, and Rust is the result of C++ programmers designing a new programming language”. This isn’t just a metaphor - Go was designed by plan9 alumni, an operating system written in C and the source of inspiration for many of Go’s features, and Rust was designed by the folks at Mozilla - whose flagship product is one of the largest C++ codebases in the world.

This is a long-term project to decode all of the GNU coreutils in version 8.3.

This resource is for novice programmers exploring the design of command-line utilities. It is best used as an accompaniment providing useful background while reading the source code of the utility you may be interested in. This is not a user guide -- Please see applicable man pages for instructions on using these utilities.

Over the past 25 years, email has weaved itself into the daily fabric of life. Our inboxes contain everything from very personal letters, to work correspondence, to unsolicited inbound sales pitches. In many ways, they are an extension of our homes: private places where we are free to deal with what life throws at us in whatever way we see fit. Have an inbox zero policy? That’s up to you. Let your inbox build into the thousands and only deal with what you can stay on top of? That’s your business too.

It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. You’ve heard the term “Read Receipts” before, so you have most likely been conditioned to believe it’s a simple “Read/Unread” status that people can opt out of. With Superhuman, it is not.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

On June 29, 2019, the FreeDOS Project turns 25 years old. That's a major milestone for any open-source software project! In honor of this anniversary, Jim Hall shares this look at how FreeDOS got started and describes its Linux roots.

V is a programming language that has been hyped a lot. As it’s recently had its first alpha release, I figured it would be a good idea to step through it and see if it lives up to the promises that the author has been claiming for months.

As far as I can tell, all of the above features are either “work-in-progress” or completely absent from the source repository.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

I’ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between, there are oceans and oceans of Java; to a remarkable degree, it runs the Internet. Except for, here and there, you find a small but steadily increasing proportion of Go.

This first post in our Protect your Privacy series, guides to help you protect your privacy and personal data, we have compiled some of the best privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don’t track you.

If you think we’ve missed something out, please leave a comment with your submission and we’ll do our best to add it.

The timeout script is a useful resource monitoring program for limiting time and memory consumption of processes in Linux. It allows you to run programs under control, and enforce time and memory limits, terminating the program upon violation of these parameters.

StackOverflow is the de facto standard place to go when you need to figure out how to do something as a programmer. A web search for information about how to check the number of lines in a file using the C programming language will probably give you StackOverflow questions as the most relevant search results. Unfortunately, while writing good, clean, reliable C does not need to be difficult, it is certainly difficult to find information about how to do it well, and the people answering these questions on StackOverflow are not filtered by their skills or knowledge of good practices. From time to time, the top-rated answer or the accepted answer is even the worst answer that addresses the question.

The best example I have seen of a straightforward line count algorithm is in a place that might seem obvious after the fact: the source code of the wc command line utility. Figure out how the -l option is handled in a good implementation of wc, and all that's left is to adapt it to your needs. Ideally, the solution you find should be short, simple, careful (e.g. checking for error conditions), robust, well-worn, and well-formatted.

The C coding standards of the OpenBSD community are among the highest and most pragmatic you'll ever find, and when someone makes a decision about implementation whose reasoning is not pretty obvious in the code itself you're almost certain to see that reasoning clearly documented in code comments, which can also teach you something about being a good programmer in general.

A complete rundown of the entire process behind designing and building a new map for the world of Cogmind, and explaining how it integrates with gameplay.

This article will give a brief introduction to SSMTP and steps to install it and use the same to send emails from Linux terminal.

The Topgrade utility will upgrade everything in Linux and Unix operating systems. It is free, open source and written using Rust.

In research & news articles, keywords form an important component since they provide a concise representation of the article’s content. Keywords also play a crucial role in locating the article from information retrieval systems, bibliographic databases and for search engine optimization. Keywords also help to categorize the article into the relevant subject or discipline.

Conventional approaches of extracting keywords involve manual assignment of keywords based on the article content and the authors’ judgment. This involves a lot of time & effort and also may not be accurate in terms of selecting the appropriate keywords. With the emergence of Natural Language Processing (NLP), keyword extraction has evolved into being effective as well as efficient.

And in this article, we will combine the two — we’ll be applying NLP on a collection of articles (more on this below) to extract keywords.