Tutorial on AngularJS with Backlift persistence

Nice little tutorial. Backlift offers an API for data persistence (a straightforward service that makes sense to me!) and have provided a little tutorial on building a webapp in Angular that uses it.

A comparison of CSS preprocessors

Nice. Sass vs. Less vs. Stylus.

Indexing in PostgreSQL

Some tips and tricks.

JS framework popularity

An analysis of Github Archive to gauge popularity trends in JavaScript webapp frameworks. I love this stuff.

Django HNN clone tutorial

Here's a cool thing - an "advanced Django tutorial" implementing an HNN-like site in Django.

Minizinc

Minizinc is a language specifically for constraint programming problems.  It's showcased a little in this article using it on a recent xkcd [oops, not so recent: 287].

Listed under AI unless I get a bee in my bonnet about constraint programming, which seems unlikely.

You can't handle security

In fact, nobody can.  Here's an entertaining article giving three examples that will convince you of this.

There's a Matasano Challenge that will step you through the basics of security.  I think I may work through this sometime soon.

Regex power

Here is a fantastic article about regular expressions, not as they are defined mathematically, but as implemented in real languages - with backreferences, regexes become NP-complete... Which blows my mind.  I had no idea!

They're still unreadable, of course.  Which means it might be worthwhile (1) to work through (or write) a really good tutorial set and (2) write some kind of ... regex preprocessing parser thing.  Which probably already exists, of course.

Anyway, that article led me to the existence of Thue, a string-rewriting language that looks ... weird, to say the least. Note that Thue is definitively described on a Wiki devoted to esoteric programming languages.

BitTorrent synch

This is cool.

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Fantastic article on visualization as a tool for thinking, and simultaneously kind of a call to action for programming tool makers.

Open-source game clones

A whole long list of open-source game clones of all description.

Webapp design stuff

Ember is a JS Webapp framework.  Here is the tutorial list.

Then there are Pure CSS and Topcoat that have shown up on HNN this week.

ML tutorials

A couple of  useful Stanford tutorials in machine learning: Andrew Ng's open courseware ML class, and a second tutorial building on that for the new stuff in deep learning.

Lucy - C-language Lucene for embedding in dynamic languages

A tutorial.  Apache has also spun out its NLP tools into a separate project OpenNLP. And Lucene can query based on Levenshtein distance, which is pretty cool.

Bounce rate for blogs

Here's an interesting tip for blogs and other sites where "conversion rate" doesn't really apply: check after a short time to see if the user is still there (using a JS snippet on the page with a timer).

ydiff: structural diff for code

Interesting.

DataNitro: Python from Excel

Neat little article using DataNitro to link SQL databases to Excel.  Neat.

Yet Another Blog Framework

Hexo.  Also Wintersmith. All in all frameworks are thick on the ground these days.

Flat file module in Perl

This is kind of neat.  I love wheel reinvention - you usually learn something.

List of probability distributions

Statistics is cool.