I decided to write a little article to discourage an unfortunately common pattern in Node.JS modules (and browser JavaScript, to a lesser extent) that can boil down to these two examples:// A:function myFunction () {  if (somethingWrong) {    throw 'This is my error'  }  return allGood;}and// B: async Node.JS-style callback with signature `fn(err, …)`function myFunction (callback) {  doSomethingAsync(function () {    // …    if (somethingWrong) {      callback('This is my error')    } else {    &nb...

At Khan Academy we've been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we're likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language.We're in a very unique position as we're primarily aiming to teach students who've been through our previous math and science-centric curriculum. Because of this we can create some rather compelling exercises and projects that never would've been feasible otherwise.The prospect of teaching the JavaScript language as a first language is actually really exciting. Teac...

Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You “hear” it every time you read a book, newspaper, magazine, or web site—every place ...

Recently, the China's largest Chinese IT community website named CSDN leaked its user's account information. Later today CSDN made an announcements to its users on their website. The announcement said that some user account information was leaked and the passwords of the accounts were stored as plain text in their database before 2009, and after 2009, they adopted an encryption algorithm to encrypt user password. They urged all users who registered the account before 2009 to change their password immediately. After reading this news, I was shocked. How come an IT website stores passwords in pl...

I first planned to release this text as an appendix entry for Learn You Some Erlang, but considering this feels more like editorial content and not exactly something for a reference text, I decided it would fit better as a blog post.Many newcomers to Erlang manage to understand the syntax and program around it without ever getting used to it. I've read and heard many complaints regarding the syntax and the 'ant turd tokens' (a subjectively funny way to refer to ,, ; and .), how annoying it is, etc.As mentioned at some point in the book, Erlang draws its syntax from Prolog. While this gives a r...

After having started to build my own internet search engine as described in a previous blog post, I now have read some papers and books about web search engine architecture and information retrieval to complete my hobby project. Here is a list of papers and books that I highly recommend to anybody who is interested in this topic:1. Google: data structures and algorithms by Petteri Huuhka2. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page3. Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. M...

There’s never been a better time to be a developer, says The Kernel’s technical editor. But in exchange for all the resources laid out in front of you, what are you doing to give back? There’s never been a better time to be a developer. Thanks to an unprecedented range of open-source software, learning resources and useful web services at our disposal, we can learn new languages, get help, collaborate with others and, if our ideas win traction, there’s now a multitude of investors waiting in the wings to help us build companies around our pro...

When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad studying computer science. There’s something critically different between programming and sports though: A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code.I was surprised that neither my TAs nor professors critiqued my code during my first year, but grew concerned after my second year. The assignments were larger and the problems tougher, but...